In order to avoid paying actual recording artists the $.003 they earn for each play of their songs, Spotify has started filling out its playlists with songs they buy cheaply from production houses and then assign to "ghost artists" with fake names and biographies.
Liz Pelly investigated the practice in her article "The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify's plot against musicians" in Harper's Magazine. Link here.
"What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with "music we benefited from financially," but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program's name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC)."
PFC seems to be mostly used in jazz, easy listening, and ambient music playlists, in which the user is assumed to be listening passively. Spotify buys the cheap music, gives it a fake title and artist, inserts it into their curated playlists, and doesn't have to pay a fee each time it's listened to.
Pelly worked with Linus Larsson, the technology editor of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, who showed her a track by "Ekfat" that has more than four million streams.
"Larsson was amused by the elaborate artist bio [on Ekfat's Spotify page], which he read aloud. It described Ekfat as a classically trained Icelandic beat maker who graduated from the "Reykjavik music conservatory," joined the "legendary Smekkleysa Lo-Fi Rockers crew" in 2017, and released music only on limited-edition cassettes until 2019. "Completely made up," Larsson said. "This is probably the most absurd example, because they really tried to make him into the coolest music producer that you can find.""
Actual artists who devote their lives to make innovative, accomplished, popular music lose out on their songs being played, generating fees, and finding an audience.
Before the work of Pelly exposing the entire scheme, listeners were puzzled by their Spotify playlists. Author Ted Gioia wrote on his Substack, "The Honest Broker":
"In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify's jazz playlists.
I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I'd never heard of before.
Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist? …
Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste's We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).
How was that even possible?"
Gioia tells about a listener, "adamfaze," who kept hearing the same track over and over on Spotify. He made a playlist composed only of 49 duplicates of that same song, each assigned a different title and "artist." And the names are odd enough for one to suspect they were devised by A.I. Among the artists who supposedly created this one song, and the song's various titles:
- Sandpon Bog, by Devil
- Qaezpoor, by Elval Woodridge
- The Proud Dewdrop Amulet, by Bones
- Whomping Clover, by Urse
- Scorch Swine, by Bailey Barton
- Trumplet Bublefig, by Mynal
And why wouldn't Spotify eventually stop paying musicians to produce even these cheap, stock-music "ghost" songs, and just have A.I. produce them? If they aren't doing so already.
I have no reason to believe Apple Music isn't doing something similar, but it would be great if they could differentiate themselves from Spotify as the streaming service that is artist-friendly. It's a large enough company with diverse revenue streams that if could afford to reinvent themselves as the service that values and supports real musicians. And that just may enable it to claw back some of the market share that Spotify has been dominating.
Vulfpeck's Jack Stratton proposed just such a strategy for Apple Music in January.
