Liz Pelly from Harper’s Magazine has uncovered a massively fucked up plot by music streaming giant Spotify.
According to her report, which itself is picking up where a Swedish news outlet left off, Spotify has implemented an evil plot to not pay artists their fair share. They’ve been filling playlists with “ghost artists” — musical artists who don’t exist but are actually a bunch of slop hastily thrown together as cheaply as possible. Usually by production companies and for the sole purpose of fleshing out playlists so popular artists don’t get played as much.
This low-cost music boosts the platform’s profit margins because it’s a lot cheaper to pay these production houses that are churning out generic music than it is to pay, say, Taylor Swift or Metallica. The evil program even has a snazzy little name. It’s the PFC, or Perfect Fit Content. What a neat and delightful little name for a program designed to not pay artists money they would be making if playlists were filled with a bunch of cheaply made bullshit.
Spotify’s ‘Ghost Artist’ Strategy Explained
The PFC program was launched in 2017. It involves a small group of producers who make tons and tons of instrumental tracks for Spotify. All those playlists of Lo-FI hip-hop, ambient music, and jazz are filled with these fake “ghost artists.” Some of them even have artist bios attached to their names that are completely fictionalized right down to the record labels they’ve been signed to.
Some of these tracks generate millions of streams. Those are millions of streams that are a lot more affordable for Spotify because they’ve worked out a deal with the production company behind that garbage song. A lot of those profits don’t go to the original artists who created them, but rather to the company that the artist works for.
Pelly’s investigation further reveals that Spotify curators who resisted this practice were pressured or even replaced by those willing to include more PFC music on major playlists. Popular playlists like “Deep Focus,” “Cocktail Jazz,” and “Ambient Relaxation” are cited as prime examples of this trend. The move to push PFC content has sparked ethical concerns among some former employees, who feel uneasy about the exploitation of anonymous creators and the manipulation of playlists for profit.
Pelly warns that the whole system is geared toward generating anonymous background music that further removes the concept of an individual artist with a voice and perspective and rather pushes a churned-out corporate product without an identity — literally filler music, the musical equivalent of packing peanuts.
It’s just music that takes up space on a playlist. How depressing. It’s even more depressing when you realize that earlier this year there was a “musician” who was arrested for churning out tons of songs generated by AI and then using an army of bots to rack up a bunch of listens on Spotify. How is that any different from what Spotify is doing? Seems like they took some cues from the con artist and got in on the con themselves after it proved quite lucrative
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