music news Report: Spotify is populating its playlists with "ghost artists"

[GraceRandolph]

A detailed new report in Harper's Magazine has alleged that Spotify is seeding some of its biggest playlists with what are known as "ghost artists," a small group of musicians who create large amounts of music to be distributed across the platform. According to writer Liz Pelly's report, the music provided through this method is subject to lower royalty rates and helps boost the streaming company's profit margins. 

The report suggests that the practice is most rife across instrumental-heavy playlists focused on genres such as lo-fi hip-hop, jazz, ambient, and classical. The playlist Deep Focus, with over 4.5 million subscribers, is among those namechecked in the article as relying on what is known internally as Perfect Fit Content. 

PFC was first introduced in 2017 with partners creating music to be shared across hundreds of artist profiles, many of which are otherwise empty. The appeal being that fewer royalties are paid out to real artists, with the money instead going to the PFC partners. It is alleged that around 20 songwriters are behind the work of more than five hundred "artists," with their streaming numbers in the millions.
 

Full article: https://www.thefader.com/2024/12/19/report-spotify-is-populating-its-playlists-with-ghost-artists

[Spicy Pisces]

I blame Gracie Abrams

[Reginald]

Finally

 

[Jotham]

What is annoying me a lot are the sponsored "artists" that keep popping up on my front page. Sometimes I will give their music a listen out of curiosity and they're so bad.

[Truth Teller]

Already jumped ship and moved to Deezer

 

[Mocha]

i thought this was going to be about dead artists like MJ and Prince

[Katamari]

Makes sense so many randoms releasing music in that site 

 

I mean good for them but they have Discogs bigger than some of my favs releasing music since the 70s

[Europe]

Yeah this is known, artists can also decide to take less royalties and then spotify will promote them more. There were articles about it a few years ago. Dua is one of the singers who did this.

[Hex]

Wasn't Liz Y2K doing something like this on the side?

[Wicked]

People need to switch services... This is crazy lol

[Alex]

2 hours ago, Hex said:

Wasn't Liz Y2K doing something like this on the side?

No i'm pretty sure she just released music that is solely pitched for sync money (to be featured in film & series) under a separate artist name so as not to officially add those background music releases to her discography ff. 

Edited Thursday at 10:50 PM by Alex