Once again Resonate has a unique offering to artists and music lovers, in that there aren’t fake artists here. This isnt a subjective term, please read this article. Its absolutely shocking what these corporations are doing to the global music community. I am furious and so should be everyone here.
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I think I heard about this on this podcast interview with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin on their new book Chokepoint Capitalism
book itself:
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Oh wow! Cool. I really want to read this, but also simultaneously worried I will give myself an ulcer- and or be so enraged that I start hunting down data servers with a hammer.
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While I agree with you @KallieMarie that it is wonderful resonate is looking like a safe-space for that, I think this issue will, unfortunately, become a thing once the resonate platform grows beyond a certain size. One way around it would be to demand identification for each artist profile, and even then I think if the incentive is big enough bigger labels et al. will find a way around it.
The article mentions some key points, which I think can be a good starting point to look at for ways to actively work against fake artists appearing on resonate:
as it turns out, most users prefer easy access to pre-curated experiences vs doing the work of actively finding what to listen to
So, how can we encourage users to actively look for music, should resonate as a platform create incentives for that or not?
“The songwriters and producers of these tracks are either paid a fixed fee per track or a combination of a low advance and reduced royalty rate and it works because these ‘labels’ can guarantee millions of streams through their own network of search engine optimized DSP playlists and YouTube channels.”
There apparently seems to be a financial advantage for songwriters and producers going down this road instead of releasing it themselves. Even though this is just an assumption, I doubt that the artists agreeing to these contracts are swimming in money and see this as a way to create their minimum monthly income as a musician. So how can resonate make these kinds of contracts unattractive to musicians without hurting the exact same artists?
Fake artist accounts are gaming the system. We can make sure that this doesn’t happen, because I cant see any reality where Resonate as a community would do this. I cant see anyone here deciding to hire a musician to make a fake song that would then be put into heavy rotation automatically via an algorithm. Our community isnt set up to base plays off of algorithms, for a start, so that’s one way this is less likely to happen. Another reason is that Resonate isn’t in it as an entity to make money. It’s here to help artists get paid fairly. Those are quite different things, and in a successful community, both eventually should see successes/return on investments of time and resources. In the other model, gaming the system to make money back into the corporate structure- well this just isn’t how we are set up. I am not really sure what your quandary or disagreement is here, as I wasn’t posing a question or a stance, but sharing the information that this is happening elsewhere, and to both highlight why what we do here is important but also for the general edification of many artists present. I think it is a “selling point” for our community, and to draw people in, because we wont do this.
But to directly square off with your question, how do we make sure this doesn’t happen? Never let Resonate drift into such a profit driven place that we would hire a musician to make music to game an algorithm if we started using one heavily and aggressively to game the system and take the lions share of splits, blocking out the countless artist who are here. Do you see, what I mean? I just cant see our cohort ever functioning that way.
