Supposedly Fake Songs on Supposedly Real Television

in search of smartdumb: Love Is Blind Season 8; Supposedly Fake Artists; Supposedly Real Songs; Liz Pelly's Blind Love For Real Artists

Intersecting Lines - Wassily Kandinsky (1923)

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In the NFL postseason, my analyst wife trades football for reality television. The show she studies is called Love Is Blind, a dating show on Netflix that debuted a few weeks before COVID lockdown. “Reality show” is a designation beneath the show’s creators, so Love Is Blind is a “social experiment where single men and women look for love and get engaged, all before meeting in person.” It is hosted by Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica’s Nick Lachey — no stranger to reality — and his current partner, the actress Vanessa Lachey.

After our son goes to sleep, we watch the show’s cast of real people sit in dystopically staged rooms called “pods” and talk to other people in adjacent “pods”, with the hope that they might find someone for the long haul. My wife is nothing if not professional. Just like with football, she takes copious notes while watching, cross-referencing the plots of former seasons and episodes, Derrida-ing her way into the show’s accidental themes and latent anxieties. Her findings are then recapped on her podcast, Love Is Kimes, with her co-host David Dennis, Jr.. (Smash that subscribe.)

It’s worth noting that the show’s title is not Is Love Blind? To appear on the show is to enter into an alternate reality in which we all testify— from the show’s creators to the people on the show to us viewers at home – that love can be blind, or perhaps could stand to be a little blind. Wouldn’t that be nice, or at least interesting, to see how that played out? That perhaps our over-reliance on our eyes and physical appearance has become a kind of moving cataract-y blind spot that keeps us from seeing people for who they really are or could be in relationship to ourselves. (Here’s the link again to my wife’s podcast.)

I confess I am only half-watching Blind most of the time, while I look up the price of vintage digital effects boxes on Reverb or read instruction manuals for Eurorack modules I don’t own. My only semi-meaningful commentary so far has been on the music supervision, which is “incredible” in the best way possible, and not a little smartdumb. The soundtrack is pop songs you have never heard before – uncannily and eerily similar to ones you’ve heard, but simply not “real” as we might say, because they are not sung by a known artist. They are “fake” songs.

It is, as the LA Times put it, a “wall-to-wall soundtrack of infectious yet strangely disposable pop songs about love and heartache, with lyrics that narrate the show so perfectly they feel as if they were generated by artificial intelligence.”

Here’s writer Meredith Blake a few years ago:

Consider a recent scene from the fourth — and arguably most unhinged — season, which concludes Friday. While enjoying a romantic date aboard a boat, lawyer Zack got down on one knee and proposed to project manager Bliss, who accepted even though she’d been passed over weeks earlier for another woman.

As Zack leaned in for a passionate kiss and ran his fingers through Bliss’ hair, a soulful acoustic song swelled on the soundtrack. “Kiss her with passion, as much as you can / Run your hands through her hair, whenever she’s sad,” went the lyrics…

You will likely not hear these songs anywhere else except in Love Is Blind, and that was the best part. They helped create a hermetic seal around the show’s dystopic reality. Not only is dating different in the Love Is Blind universe, but the music is different there too. You are fully immersed into a new reality; these songs are the most popular songs in that world.

In the world of Love Is Blind, these supposedly “fake” library songs serve the illusion of the show in a uncannily real way. I always thought it to be a deliberate feature of the show. So you can imagine my surprise — how thoroughly my own reality was punctured – upon hearing Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” early on in Season 8, or Black Eyed Peas’s “I Gotta Feeling”, or Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours”. These are songs that firmly exist in our reality, not theirs. Why was I hearing them? Who was hearing them?

I won’t bore you with the copyright technicalities of library music or “sync music” as it’s better known. Suffice it to say that “sync music” is often cheaper than licensing better known songs by supposedly “real” artists on “real” labels or with “real” publishers. The music is technically just as competent, well-performed, and well-recorded as supposedly “real” music. But instead of distributing the music under the umbrella of a “real” artist and agreeing to the pay structures of the music industry, the musicians who make sync music do so on behalf of a sync catalog company, who in exchange for the work and underlying copyrights will offer a total buyout upfront. It’s an honest living, and a fairly uncomplicated relationship with music: Making music in service of a feeling or function, not in service of capital or celebrity or other fictions that the music industry has grafted onto our fragile medium.

This season of Love Is Blind is the first time in the show’s run that supposedly “real” songs are being licensed. “Being able to incorporate some of these great songs and great artists into the show is really exciting, and hopefully an elevating, entertaining experience for the audience,” show creator / ChatGPT impersonator Chris Coelen told Variety last week.

What Coelen seems to misunderstand is that I don’t want an elevating, entertaining experience. Perhaps similar to what’s happening in video games too, where players are less and less interested in games with realistic graphics. I don’t want our reality. I want their reality.

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As much as I want to, I won’t make the case that the supposedly fake music of Love Is Blind is a lot more interesting than the supposedly real music of, like, The Kid LAROI.

But if you’ll excuse some light Chuck Eddy cosplay, I want to talk about fake artists, and how, no surprise to anyone who reads this newsletter, I often prefer “fake” music made by “fake” artists over “real” music made by “real” artists. My least favorite kind of music is “real” music made by “fake” artists. My favorite is “fake” music made by “real” ones.

Which brings me to Liz Pelly’s Spotify broadside. I admire Pelly (and her sister Jenn) so much. And I support her main point: the streaming economy has eroded the monetary and spiritual value of music. Writing about the music industry is a labor of love, and Liz has put considerable effort into investigating streaming – not just the business but the broader costs. She’s a true ally to musicians and artists. We are all grateful to her for sounding the alarm.

But I find her spite for “fake artists” to be a bit underexamined. One re-reveal of her Harper’s piece, the well-documented observation that Spotify had begun to use “fake” or “ghost” music for certain electronic chill/lifestyle playlists instead of “real” music by more established electronic artists like Jon Hopkins or Bibio, seems to presuppose several things:

1. People who want to chill would prefer to listen to Jon Hopkins and/or Bibio whilst chilling. (My guess is: Internal data likely has proven otherwise. What’s likely is that the things that make Hopkins/Bibio’s music interesting and unique are the same things that stick out and make them less suitable to background listening than music composed explicitly to stay in the background.)

2. The “real” music of Jon Hopkins and/or Bibio is more conducive to chilling than “fake” library music written precisely for the purpose of chilling. (My friends: Chilling is competitive business. Especially in sleep/relaxation playlists, sync music composers are incredibly precise about the optimum dynamic range, frequency spectrum, harmonic movement, instrumentation, even flavor of white noise and water sound used in their compositions. That’s because Spotify and Apple have extreme amounts of data on listener habits. They know exactly what will keep their listeners on the platform. It’s frustrating. In a past life, I humbled myself to the task of trying to learn the rules of modern ambient playlist music, not unlike learning the rules of a sonata or a rondo. I worked quite hard at getting records on the Apple Sleep/Chill playlists, attempting to replicate the sound of whichever Apple-owned, Platoon-distributed content(s) dominates that playlist — and as close as I would get, there was always something missing. It’s a genre unto itself, which is why at this point 99.5% of the music on that playlist is likely the same few “fake” musicians making it.)

3. Music written with a clear function in mind, as opposed to music written for the purpose of artistic self-expression (cf. Hopkins; Bibio), is a less metaphysically valuable kind of music. Perhaps because it courts commerce so flagrantly, it is not “art” at all. (Many of us unwittingly inherit a Euro/Western/white understanding of music’s value strictly in terms of individual expression/harmonic complexity/melody is most important/etc, and in turn undervalue music’s much longer history as functional social medium — in war, in religion, in the home, in dance, etc. Is the bell player in a West African drum circle a fake musician playing fake music? Is my son, who puts the entirety of a plastic toy microphone into his mouth before screaming at the top of his lungs, a real one? This line of inquiry gets tricky quickly.)

4. “Real” artists have “biographies” and “links to websites.” A Google search would not “come up empty” for a “real” artist. (Many people make art and choose art as their ‘social medium’ because they want people to engage with them through their art, not in relation to the person who made it, cf Gaddis, ‘artists are the dregs of their work’, etc. In any case, this line of thinking also gets tricky. Are you more real if your biography is longer? If you have more links to more websites?)

5. “Low-budget stock muzak” is “steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living.” (The ‘actual tradition’ of artists making a living through work that serves no apparent function is a relatively new phenomenon, and the ‘actual tradition’ of artists as the primary organizing principle of music is even newer, an inadvertent demand created by the dominance of the pop recording industry in the last century. An aside: Why can’t ‘music for Apple Sleep playlists’ be an actual tradition? Was the vaunted Motown tradition not, by Gordy’s openly admitted design, a playlist of deliberately simplified black music for record-buying, radio-listening white people?)

6. "Stock muzak” is not made by “real” artists. (Where does this leave producers and songwriters? All the people who help make the music for supposedly real artists? This gets into rockism territory quickly.)

7. “Stock muzak” by “fake artists” is not just a matter of “authenticity in music,” but a “matter of survival for actual artists, of musicians having the ability to earn a living on one of the largest platforms for music.” (Actual artists! Earning a living! When it would seem, by this logic, that the only way to identify an actual artist is if they aren’t earning a living! More shortly!)

8. Only “real” artists should be able to earn a living making music. “Real” jazz musicians, like the one Pelly interviewed on the park bench, seem to encounter a reduction in their own sense of realness whenever they dabble in “fake jazz.” (My condolences, James Jamerson)

I don’t believe Liz intends to denigrate working-class musicians. Her point is much more holistic: the system is so rigged that music workers have a better shot at a living wage making “fake” music for library companies than attempting to make “real” music as or for “real” artists. If they were able to make “real” music, they also could see potentially bigger payouts and perhaps most importantly, their souls wouldn’t need to be crushed. Hate the game, not the player, etc (though I’m not sure where that leaves the rapper the Game).

She’s not wrong, but neither is my reality: I like making fake music. Just as much as I like making real music. So do most of my professional colleagues. We just like making music. It is a compulsion. We try are best to make money from that compulsion.

And truthfully, laboring on behalf of “real” artists you’ve heard of, who make supposedly real music, is often way more soul-crushing than writing music for sync. The soul-crushing aspect has nothing to do with the content of the music. It has to do with how our work is valued and dignified by the people who do or don’t pay us for our work. Functionally, artists are proper nouns – organizing principles for audio content. Functionally, there is no difference between the 20 or so songwriters who make music under the umbrella of a fake ambient library artist and the 20 or so songwriters whose names are listed under a Rihanna record. You’re almost certainly not meeting the artist!

When you go to such great lengths to distinguish between “fake” music and “real” music, you do the recorded music industry’s bidding for them. More than fame or money, the recorded music industry sells music makers on the promise of being a “real” artist, or working on “real” music with a “real” artist and getting a “real” cut. Sometimes it works out just fine and you make enough money to keep going or buy a nice watch. But it’s important to recognize it as a fiction, and one I’d argue is way more dangerous to artists and music makers than any WFH sync gig.

In a sync licensing agreement, such as when I write music for a commercial, I get paid a clear, agreed-upon fee for my labor. There is a brief, a deadline, an agreed upon number of revisions, and a kill fee if the client ultimately doesn’t like my work. You don’t see any money beyond the original fee, but here’s something worth noting: most music does not generate significant royalty income anyway. It’s not an act of desperation to take the money upfront. It’s just good business.

In the music industry, where I write real music for real artists, there is no upfront agreement. It’s also almost always on spec — as in, let’s see what happens. That’s the spirit of music, for sure. But what that means is, if I ever expect to be paid for my work, I still have to deliver all of it upfront and provide the client/label with near-finished products. What that means, roughly:

As producer, I host the artist, for free, at the studio whose rent I alone play, using recording equipment I bought with my own money.

I co-write a song with the artist at no cost, create or co-create the production, record, edit, and mix the artist’s vocals at no cost. In 2025, “demo vocals” are often the final recordings, and are expected to sound pretty close to finished.

At no cost, I print these pre-mixed stems for the mixing engineer who will eventually “mix” the record, which means find the 5% of the record s/he can improve on without crossing the artist/label demoitis Rubicon. It’s basically like playing Operation but with audio, with a whole slew of deliverables afterwards.

Then I wait for one or two or five years to see whether the label who signed the artist even wants the record, or even still works with the artist. Only then, at that point, do we talk about me getting compensated for my labor.

To keep things clean but not too off from reality, let’s say you have to quote around $5,000 to $7500/record just to make a decent wage. This amount covers your time and expenses and administrative personnel (management, lawyer, assistants, session players whose fees you fronted just to keep things rolling, etc). You quote $10k because you know the label’s A&R usually will push back and try to get you for half that. If it’s a big artist, maybe budget isn’t as much of an issue but you still get push back on points. If it’s a new signee or “baby artist”, the negotiation turns into this whole thing about "believing in the artist” and “everybody is coming down on their fees because we believe in the project” and so on. Are you not going to believe? So you agree to half your fee and a percentage of the royalty.

Some fun facts about royalties though: Your publishing royalties are next to worthless unless the record does well on pop radio, and fewer and fewer records end up there anymore. Maybe you get a sync – on a Netflix show, like Love Is Blind – but that’s topping out around $7.5k/side, maybe $10k and usually half that if it’s an indie, and you’re only seeing a a percentage of the publishing side really. If you get a contract with master royalties from the label, they’re usually ‘crossed’ with the entire project, meaning the artist’s entire recording and sometimes marketing budget need to be recouped before you see any residuals.

More likely than not, the record will come out before you have an agreement in place with the label anyway. It will get done eventually, as I mentioned in my post last week. You like the artist! You want to preserve the relationship with them and their team and the label. You don’t want to be “difficult”. It’s a volume business, you’re told – take as many shots on goal as possible. While you’re waiting to get paid, an A&R wants to know if you have any instrumentals for a k-pop artist you’ve never heard of who’s going solo. They’re looking for something “fierce” and “playful.” Why not? So you spend a day or two making fierce and playful instrumentals, knowing fully well you’ll likely never hear anything about this project ever again.

This is the business of “real” music. I am so grateful I get to do what I get to do. It’s not a reality show, but it is a social experiment. You wake up, you show up to your pod. You hope it all works out.