A new report has accused Spotify of placing “ghost artists” on many of its playlists to prioritize its bottom line.
Published in Harper’s Magazine, the investigation by journalist Liz Pelly alleges that the streaming giant employed around 20 songwriters to create thousands of tracks by more than 500 “ghost artists,” which were then placed on playlists and streamed millions of times.
Occurring most frequently across non-lyrical genres like ambient, classical, and lo-fi hip-hop, Pelly argues that the move was a financial one, as Spotify attempted to bolster the stream counts of these in-house tracks, saving the platform money on royalties, which are effectively paid back to Spotify itself.
“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,’ Pelly wrote. “But also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they’re effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.”
The internal program, dubbed Perfect Fit Content (PFC), “raises troubling prospects for working musicians,” according to Pelly, by decreasing the chances of actual artists making it onto potentially lucrative playlists.
She also argues that the practice “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.”
Next year, Pelly is also set to publish a book covering the Spotify ghost artist phenomenon in detail, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
Read the full report here via Harper’s Magazine.
Featured image from Unsplash.com.
