According to a shocking new book, Spotify has been promoting so-called “ghost artists” so it can avoid paying its piddling royalties to real artists.
In an excerpt from “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” published in Harper’s, author Liz Pelly reveals that the streaming platform has a secretive internal program that prioritizes cheap and generic music.
Dubbed “Perfect Fit Content” or PFC for short, this program not only involved a network of affiliated production firms creating tons of “low-budget stock muzak” for the platform, but also a team of employees who surreptitiously placed tracks from those firms on Spotify’s curated playlists.
“In doing so,” Pelly wrote, “they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.”
Piloted in the mid-2010s, PFC reportedly became one of Spotify’s biggest profitability schemes by 2017.
As one former employee told the author, playlist editors at the streaming service began to see a new column on their dashboards soon after the program officially launched that, along with stats like plays, likes, and skip rates, would show how well each playlist they made worked with “music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins.”
Not long after that new column appeared on employee dashboards, managers began pushing their underlings to add PFC songs to the playlists they were crafting for the platform.
“Initially, they would give us links to stuff, like, ‘Oh, it’s no pressure for you to add it, but if you can, that would be great,'” the ex-Spotify employee told Pelly. “Then it became more aggressive, like, ‘Oh, this is the style of music in your playlist, if you try it and it works, then why not?'”
Other former employees told the author that they wished they’d pushed back more against that pressure from higher-ups because, as one put it, “some of us really didn’t feel good about what was happening.”
“We didn’t like that it was these two guys that normally write pop songs replacing swaths of artists across the board,” the former Spotify-er said. “It’s just not fair. But it was like trying to stop a train that was already leaving.”
As it became clearer and clearer that many of the company’s then-current editors were skeptical of the program, Spotify began bringing in new blood that didn’t care about the ethics of it. By 2023, when Pelly was writing her book, the team overseeing the PFC model was responsible for “several hundred” playlists. Of those, more than 150 playlists bearing titles like “Deep Focus,” “Cocktail Jazz,” and “Morning Stretch” were populated almost entirely by PFC content.
To make matters worse, a jazz musician Pelly spoke to who moonlighted as an ambient trackmaker for one of Spotify’s PFC partners told her that he was offered an upfront fee of a few hundred dollars and told he would not own the master rights to the track.
Because it was an easy gig, the musician composed a few tracks for the firm that were released under aliases on Spotify. After a few of the tracks began getting millions of streams, however, he realized that he may have been ripped off.
“I’m selling my intellectual property for essentially peanuts,” the musician told the writer.
Perhaps most offensive about this entire alleged scheme, which Spotify seems not to have commented on in the excerpt published by Harper’s, is that the company is doing so to avoid paying infinitesimally small royalties to real artists that generally only make a fraction of a cent per stream.
Though Spotify has repeatedly denied that it creates music in-house and said in 2017 that such claims were “categorically untrue, full stop,” CEO Daniel Ek tweeted earlier this year that “the cost of creating content” is now “close to zero” — a bizarre statement to make for someone whose company claims to not be in the business of ghost artistry.
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