How Fake Song Lyrics Ended Up On Spotify

DevNull127 writes: More bad news for Spotify from Conde Naste via their music site Pitchfork: Last month, in the tone of a band reluctantly summoned from some deep seabed, My Bloody Valentine issued a prickly public service announcement: "Just noticed that Spotify has put fake lyrics up for our songs without our knowledge," the Irish shoegazers tweeted. "These lyrics are actually completely incorrect and insulting." Cocteau Twins' Simon Raymonde chimed in to report that they, too, had found gibberish transcriptions of their famously elliptical songs on streaming services. The lyric snafu was not limited to Spotify. Over the past decade, a data platform called Musixmatch has assumed dominion over the world of lyrics, securing sub-licensing deals with the major publishing companies. The lyrics you see on Spotify, Tidal, and Amazon Music usually come through Musixmatch, via a data pipeline that links the platform's enormous transcriber community with a small core of paid quality-control monitors. (Apple Music has a dedicated lyrics team handling most of its transcriptions.) The affair illustrates tech capitalism's discombobulation when faced with a key element in art, which is the inexplicable. I think the problem, though, is not Musixmatch and its protocol so much as the service's unilateral rollout, with quasi-official imprimatur, on platforms already under fire for flattening artistic identity and repackaging music as scaleable content. Having sub-licensed the rights, Musixmatch is perfectly entitled to crowd-source transcriptions and sell them on. But artists should know whose words are being put in their mouthsand that, should they wish, they have the right to opt out.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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