It’s the most repetitive musical time of the year. Stores have been torturing their staff with an endlessly looping soundtrack of the same songs – in some cases since August. Even friends are playing golden Christmas oldies from the 1930s to 1950s.
Once upon a time – within my lifetime, in fact – stores and restaurants were silent. Into that silence came Muzak. I may be exaggerating: Wikipedia tells me the company dates to 1934. But it feels true.
The trend through all those years has been toward turning music into a commodity and pushing musicians into the poorly paid background by rerecording “for hire” to avoid paying royalties, among other tactics.
That process has now reached its nadir with the revelation by Liz Pelly at Harper’s Magazine that Spotify has taken to filling its playlists with “fake” music – that is, music created at scale by production companies and assigned to “ghost artists” who don’t really exist. For users looking for playlists of background music, it’s good enough; for Spotify it’s far more lucrative than streaming well-known artists who must be paid royalties (even at greatly reduced rates from the old days of radio).
Pelly describes the reasoning behind the company’s “Perfect Fit Content” program this way: “Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening?” This is music as lava lamp.
And you thought AI was going to be the problem. But no, the problem is not the technology, it’s the business model. At The New Yorker, Hua Hsu ruminates on Pelly’s imminently forthcoming book, Mood Machine, in terms of opportunity costs: what is the music we’re not hearing as artists desperate to make a living divert to conform to today’s data-driven landscape? I was particularly struck by Hsu’s data point that Spotify has stopped paying royalties on tracks that are streamed fewer than 1,000 times in a year. From those who have little, everything is taken.
The kind of music I play – traditional and traditional-influenced contemporary – is the opposite of all this. Except for a brief period in the 1960s (“the folk scare”), folk musicians made our own way. We put out our own albums long before it became fashionable, and sold from the stage because we had to. If the trend continues, most other musicians will either become like us or be non-playing characters in an industry that couldn’t exist without them.
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The current Labour government is legislating the next stage of reforming the House of Lords: the remaining 92 hereditary peers are to be ousted. This plan is a mere twig compared to Keir Starmer’s stated intention in 2020 and 2022 to abolish it entirely. At the Guardian, Simon Jenkins is dissatisfied: remove the hereditaries, sure, but, “There is no mention of bishops and donors, let alone Downing Street’s clothing suppliers and former secretaries. For its hordes of retired politicians, the place will remain a luxurious club that makes the Garrick [club] look like a greasy spoon.”
Jenkins’ main question is the right one: what do you replace the Lords with? It is widely known among the sort of activists who testify in Parliament that you get deeper and more thoughtful questions in the Lords than you ever do in the Commons. Even if you disagree with members like Big Issue founder John Bird and children’s rights campaigner and filmmaker Beeban Kidron, or even the hereditary Earl of Erroll, who worked in the IT industry and has been a supporter of digital rights for years, it’s clear they’re offering value. Yet I’d be surprised to see them stand for election, and as a result it’s not clear that a second wholly elected chamber would be an upgrade.
With change afoot, it’s worth calling out the December 18 Lords Grand Committee debate on the data bill. I tuned in late, just in time to hear Kidron and Timothy Clement-Jones dig into AI and UK copyright law. This is the Labour plan to create an exception to copyright law so AI companies can scrape data at will to train their models. As Robert Booth writes at the Guardian, there has been, unsurprisingly, widespread opposition from the creative sector. Among other naysayers, Kidron compared the government’s suggested system to asking shopkeepers to “opt out of shoplifters”.
So they’re in this ancient setting, wearing modern clothes, using the – let’s call it – *vintage* elocutionary styling of the House of Lords…and talking intelligently and calmly about the iniquity of vendors locking schools into expensive contracts for software they don’t need, and AI companies’ growing disregard for robots.txt. Awesome. Let’s keep that, somehow.
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In our 20 years of friendship I never knew that John “JI” Ioannidis, who died last month, had invented technology billions of people use every day. As a graduate student at Columbia, where he received his PhD in 1993, in work technical experts have called “transformative”, Ioannidis solved the difficult problem of forwarding Internet data to devices moving around from network to network: Mobile IP, in other words. He also worked on IPSec, trust management, and prevention of denial of service attacks.
“He was a genius,” says one of his colleagues, and “severely undercredited”. He is survived by his brother and sister, and an infinite number of friends who went for dim sum with him. RIP.
Illustrations: Cartoon by veteran computer programmer Jef Poskanzer. Used by permission.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
