So, Where’s Strange Fruits?

Quick recap if you missed the action: Steve Void‘s label Strange Fruits, which served a variety of electronic pop and commercial house records, became a factory for anonymous releases with curious automated accounts, all representing cartoons and with hundreds of thousands (at least) of streaming statistics. A real revenue collecting machine, with no real human involved except for the mysterious team involved. We asked some questions in 2020, but to no avail. So let’s find out what transpired.

There has been an improvement. Or better, two.
First of all, Strange Fruits didn’t make NFTs out of their characters/mascots. Considering their desire of cashing in and the sidelining of transparency, that’s impressive. But maybe there’s a real audience following them, eh?

Instead of dumber virtual animals, now we have a generic account called “Dance Fruits Music”. Five million active listeners at that too. The numbers remain crazy high, however, at least people know that there isn’t a real artist involved, but rather an entity buying those songs elsewhere and releasing them without credits. That’s a positive change for one, at least from our point of view.

The rate of release has also dropped down, and after a compilation titled “House Party” in 2021, the “Strange Fruits Music” account has regurgitated a release every one or two months. Sometimes they do feature ‘real’ humans like Steve Void or DMNDS!

Although, that doesn’t directly translate to an increase in their quality level. Au contraire, every single track is basically a bland Slap reboot of some famous hit. With zero effort. “Tom’s Diner“, “Numb“, “Calabria” (remixing “Destination Calabria”), “Alors On Dance“, “Mr. Saxobeat“, and the list doesn’t stop here. There are all one and the same, low-quality Brazilian Bass rework we are all fed up with. At least the creepy creatures found some variations!

So, Steve Void has decided to alter strategies, always intending to maximize profits. It’s a tad bit more transparent, let’s be honest. We know that the songs are probably from his label, without the previous intricacy. Probably he gets them off ghost-production sites.

However, this stream of useless reworks blatantly created for cashing in, without even a name or a pinch of creativity behind with an over-abused tactic is so, so saddening. That’s someone who doesn’t care about music at all, exploiting the algorithm in a ridicolous way. Is this still art? Or pure, egocentric business?