> Who will ever look up a song and favourite it on Spotify if there are no humans behind it?

"Obscurest Vinyl" has 249,608 monthly listeners on Spotify. No one is interested in the humans behind their hit "I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again".

The "relaxing piano for studying" type playlists get a huge amount of streams, and they're among the easiest to fill with AI slop

People like me who mostly take songs at face value, valuing them by music and lyrics, and don't really care about who wrote or performed them, much less what else they're up to in their lives?

That said, the quantity of music is in itself a problem. Half the value of art is in experiencing the same thing as others. It's going to get even harder with cheap generative art. The better it is, the worse the situation gets.

Personally 3/4 times I'll put my big Spotify playlist on random or play a Spotify curated playlist. Certainly there is scope there for Spotify to select songs based on their licensing costs.

I've certainly had a hunch that certain songs get much more frequent rotation than others on my liked songs playlist (although I appreciate humans are notorious for picking out patterns where there are none!)

Like 10% of the music I listen to is a deliberate listening experience: I sit on the sofa and play something that I like.

The other 90%? Background music, e.g. for daily exercise, where I mostly want upbeat music that keeps me moving and sounds good.

For the 10% I prefer humans, for the 90%, if the AI music gets good enough, I'm afraid it will do the job just fine.

People will just follow curators, who pull the right AI music into the right playlists.

I haven’t cared about the artists (their biography or something?) since I was a teenager. Just the music.

But I’m also the kind of person that hardly ever goes to concerts.

K/DA and Hatsune Miku would like a word, perhaps.

I view them (and Gorillaz) as counter-examples.

I feel like more people are familiar with Miku than her music.

I rather think that makes them examples on point, specifically on the point that:

> success today is not about the quality of the music but instead about the audience's connection with the artist

...although I would rather say "sense of connection", since in all three of these cases there is in the narrow sense no "artist" involved at all.

More broadly, this seems a fairly uncontroversial point, given how crowded by supply our current media markets are made. Certainly it seems like it would be uncontroversial on that supply side, at least if what I hear from artists and writers and musicians in my circles is any guide.

As an anecdotal statement, I do not want a connection or care about the artist. I also don't connect (or want to) with directors, writers, actors etc in TV shows and movies I view.

Music is just another consumable form of entertainment for me, and if I like the song I don't care who made it.