Report: Spotify Filling Playlists with Ghost Artists to Minimize Royalty Costs

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Liz Pelly, writing for Harper’s Magazine:

For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. 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). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

And:

Another former playlist editor told me that employees were concerned that the company wasn’t being transparent with users about the origin of this material. Still another former editor told me that he didn’t know where the music was coming from, though he was aware that adding it to his playlists was important for the company. “Maybe I should have asked more questions,” he told me, “but I was just kind of like, ‘Okay, how do I mix this music with artists that I like and not have them stand out?’ ”

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