Spotify's biggest enemy are the record labels that they have to pay license fees to. Slowly ramp up the AI slop while ramping down the label-owned material and hope subscribers don't notice. It's a play that worked for Netflix, which used to have every major show a decade ago and is now majority mass-produced Netflix Original slop.
Apple Music isn't a solo business and doesn't report its figures publicly, so it's not known if its margins would be sustainable if it weren't anchored to its much bigger Software and Services unit, which itself is anchored to an even bigger hardware sales unit.
Spotify pays ~70% of revenue to rights-holders, so unless you assume that Apple is paying a lot more, Apple Music is almost certainly profitable both as a standalone service and as a strategic bundle driver.
And this is because Spotify has a free, ad-based tier that pays way less than the paid premium listeners. Whereas Apple Music is all paying users (ignored the limited free trial)
I noticed music in TV shows is AI slop so they don't have to pay licensing fees lately as well. I was watching Unsolved the series about the Notorious BIG and Tupac murders a few weeks ago and in one of the club scenes a "Biggie" song that I'd never heard of was playing in the background, I wasn't familiar with that song so I googled it and it was an ai Biggie inspired recreation, not one of his actual songs.
That's awful. Stuff like this is why I mourn the loss of MTV and VH1; they would actually license artists' music in their Behind the Music documentary episodes, I discovered a lot of artists that way.
The Beavis & Butthead and Daria shows in the '90s also used a lot of licensed music. When the DVD versions arrived in the mid-2000s, the music was removed and replaced by stock instrumentals; I'm not sure the torrents of the original versions are even being seeded anymore.
> When the DVD versions arrived in the mid-2000s, the music was removed and replaced by stock instrumentals;
That's so annoying- that can replace the entire feel of a scene!
In the Unsolved instance I was annoyed because I was like, huh, I don't know this song let me go check it out, I thought I knew his whole catalogue! and then it was frustrating that it was just "him" singing some nonsense fake song. Just eery how they used an identical sounding voice too.
I found the Daria Restoration Project online a few years ago. Haven't watched it yet, because the quality is more in line with 2000s Limewire DivX files. But if I do decide to watch the show, it should be with the original music.
It is sad, but not surprising, that the primary driver behind AI is the "Do everything as cheap as possible" mindset - not for innovation, especially not for quality.
