Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify.
In your playlist, without you knowing it, there may be songs by artists that… don’t exist. Spotify’s secret internal program will prioritize cheap and generic music.
In “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist,” Liz Pelly accuses Spotify of promoting so-called “ghost artists” to avoid paying royalties to real artists.
The Swedish music platform would have a program called “Perfect Fit Content” or PFCwhich not only involved a network of affiliated production companies who created tons of “low-budget stock muzak” for the platform, but also a team of employees who surreptitiously placed tracks from these companies on curated Spotify playlists, says .
“In doing so they are effectively working towards increase the percentage of total music streams that are cheaper for the platform“, writes Pelly, whose internal sources were former employees of the platform.
According to the author, more than 150 playlists with titles like “Deep Focus”, “Cocktail Jazz” and “Morning Stretch” were in 2023 filled almost exclusively with PFC content.
“It’s not fair”commented the author’s sources, who guarantee: “some of us didn’t feel good about what was happening”.
One jazz musician Pelly spoke to who worked as an ambient music composer for one of Spotify’s PFC partners even said he was offered an initial fee of a few hundred euros and was told that would not have copyright to the track. “I’m selling my intellectual property essentially for peanuts,” said the musician.
According to the book, Spotify does this just to avoid paying royalties (copyright) extremely small to real artists who generally only earn a fraction of a cent each streaming.
It’s no wonder, then, that the CEO Daniel Ektenha earlier this year that “the cost of creating content” is now “close to zero.”
