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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2606 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 25, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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[A musical mystery]

There’s a pair of artists I love that I discovered on Spotify a ways back, and both have entirely opaque un-googleable names.

I have some guesses as to who they actually are, mostly based on their “related artists” but I can’t find anything concrete.

Rather than let it stew I figured I’d ask around at my favorite online hangout for people with “special” brains, so to speak.

Example One

Example Two

Also I’m very interested as to two aspects of these artists;

1.) These songs are very highly streamed, with more than a million streams on their biggest hits. they aren’t exactly obscure, how have they gotten so much attention if you literally can’t search them anywhere?

2.) What compels an artist to produce art under a name so utterly baffling and incomprehensible? There’s at least a dozen more artists that I’ve run into on Spotify that have the same schtick going on, and they seem popular.

The first is a four tet alias.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/6400214-%EA%89%BA%E1%83%9A%E0%AE%87-%EA%89%BA%E1%83%9A

The second is a project called erased tapes.

https://erasedtapes.bandcamp.com/album/erased-tapes-20-0

Thank you! I knew someone here would either know the answer or be able to figure it out quickly.

That also explains why they are fairly popular as well despite not being easily searchable. Four Tet is huge and it seems like Erased Tapes was a big project that got a ton of buzz.

Doesn’t hurt that the music is good.

Not as extreme of an example as these, but perhaps relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/!!!

Seems to be that they are most likely 'fake' artists and songs, created by Spotify to pad out their playlists without having to pay so much in royalties to real musicians.

While that’s very interesting, I find it very improbable with the two examples I’ve listed above

Firstly because these artists have millions of streams but also because the names of the artists are too weird a bespoke, they aren’t even in any English characters let alone any language on earth, one is all weird symbols and the other is clearly Morse code or something akin to it.

That and the music is not genetic enough to fit the hypothesis. The one artist linked with the more code incorporates it into the songs themselves.

If you were faking artists you wouldn’t put this much effort into it.

Definitely not. Fake artists and songs have names that actually seem plausible.

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