Every night, I bury my tinnitus under brown noise, cats’ purrs, and the tap of rain on leaves. This “functional music,” as it is known, certainly serves its function—lulling me to sleep. It also accounts for a vast portion of the streaming world: Spotify recently revealed that white noise and ambient podcasts rack up 3 million hours of listens a day.
In a weird industry quirk, these ambient sounds, often recorded or generated by AI, are assigned the same monetary value as actual songs. One stream is one credit—one equal piece of the pot that’s shared among everyone. A system like that is pretty easy to game.
A deal struck between Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record label, and the French streaming service Deezer promises to change this. Under a new model, which Deezer has branded “artist-centric,” Deezer will demonetize the hum of the washing machine and the drone of bot-generated muzak. Additionally, every stream of someone whom Deezer dubs a “professional artist”—those with a minimum of 1,000 streams per month by a minimum of 500 unique listeners—will count for double. Hunting for specific artists will double this again, so if I search “Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle” and listen to “A Whole New World (Aladdin’s Theme),” that will count as four streams. The demonetized “nonartist noise audio” will eventually be replaced with Deezer’s own in-house functional music, not included in the royalty pool.
“We are essentially taking away the incentive to try and monetize any other content on our platform than music created by artists who attract a consistent and engaged fan base,” Deezer chief executive Jeronimo Folgueira says.
Any tinkering with the unyielding music streaming model, largely unchanged since Spotify’s launch in 2008, is welcome news, and this deal does shift the dial in artists’ favor. Yet streaming is still conducted at the whims of the majors. Those yearning for revolution will have to hope this signals the start of an open dialog. Not everyone is convinced.
“We really need to call into question when a company like UMG claims a new partnership will ‘better reward the artists’ and reflect ‘the true value of artist-fan relationships.’ Which artists and which fans?” says Liz Pelly, a music journalist who is writing a book about the streaming industry. “The answer is pretty obvious.”
Universal Music declined to give an attributable comment.
Streambait spammers have long infested streaming platforms: Deezer estimates 7 percent of its streams are fraudulent. These scams employ a variety of subterfuges. They might involve uploads with optimized search names like “Relaxing Music Music Therapy” or “Relaxation, Sound Therapy.” Sometimes, they are songs just long enough, at 31 seconds, to trigger royalty payments. Other times, scammers will upload 10,000 versions of the same track, each with a different artist name. As generative AI becomes more accessible and sophisticated, spamming platforms is only going to get easier.
Streams tagged as “noise” represented approximately 2 percent of streams on Deezer. The company didn’t share exact figures, but white noise and other nonmusic content “significantly” dilutes professional artists’ royalties, says Folgueira. And we do have figures for how this clutter plagues the biggest streamers: Spotify has found that removing white noise would boost its annual gross profit by $38 million.
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