The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed
A year-long investigation by an indie journalist is a call to action
In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists.
I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.
Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?
In April 2022, I finally felt justified in sharing my concerns with readers. So I published an article here called “The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize.”
I was careful not to make accusations I couldn’t prove. But I pointed out some puzzling facts.
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Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names.
Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).
How was that even possible?
I continued to make inquiries, and brooded over this strange situation. But something even stranger happened a few months later.
A listener noticed that he kept hearing the same track over and over on Spotify. But when he checked the name of the song, it was always different. Even worse, these almost identical tracks were attributed to different artists and composers.
He created a playlist, and soon had 49 different versions of this song under various names. The titles sounded as if they had come out of a random text generator—almost as if the goal was to make them hard to remember.
Trumpet Bumblefig
Bumble Mistywill
Whomping Clover
Qeazpoor
Swiftspark
Vattio Bud
I reported on this odd situation. Others joined in the hunt, and found more versions of the track under still different names.
The track itself was boring and non-descript, but it was showing up everywhere on the platform.
Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different.
Were these AI generated? Was Spotify doing this to avoid paying royalties to human musicians?
Spotify issued a statement in the face of these controversies. But I couldn’t find any denial that they were playing games with playlists in order to boost profits.
By total coincidence, Spotify’s profitability started to improve markedly around this time.
A few months ago, I spoke with an editor at one of the largest newspapers in the world. I begged him to put together a team of investigative journalists to get to the bottom of this.
“You need to send people to Sweden. You need to find sources. You need to find out what’s really going on.”
He wasn’t interested in any of that. He just wanted a spicy opinion piece. I declined his invitation to write it.
We now finally have the ugly truth on these fake artists—but no thanks to Spotify. Or to that prestigious newspaper whose editor I petitioned.
Instead journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
Mood Machine will show up in bookstores in January and may finally wake up the music industry to the dangers it faces.
Pelly started by knocking on the doors of these mysterious viral artists in Sweden.
Guess what? Nobody wanted to talk. At least not at first.
But Pelly kept pursuing this story for a year. She convinced former employees to reveal what they knew. She got her hands on internal documents. She read Slack messages from the company. And she slowly put the pieces together.
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.
In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels.
At Spotify they call this the “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program. Musicians who provide PFC tracks “must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative.”
Spotify apparently targeted genres where they could promote passive consumption. They identified situations in which listeners use playlists for background music. That’s why I noticed the fake artists problem first in my jazz listening.
According to Pelly, the focal points of PFC were “ambient, classical, electronic, jazz, and lo-fi beats.”
When some employees expressed concerns about this, Spotify managers replied (according to Pelly’s sources) that “listeners wouldn’t know the difference.”
They called it payola in the 1950s. The public learned that radio deejays picked songs for airplay based on cash kickbacks, not musical merit.
Music fans got angry and demanded action. In 1959, both the US Senate and House launched investigations. Famous deejay Alan Freed got fired from WABC after refusing to sign a statement claiming that he had never taken bribes.
Transactions nowadays are handled more delicately—and seemingly in full compliance with the laws. Nobody gives Spotify execs an envelope filled with cash.
But this is better than payola:
On February 7, Spotify’s CEO sold 250K shares for $57.5 million.
On April 24, Spotify’s CEO sold 400K shares for $118.8 million.
On November 15, Spotify’s CEO sold 75K shares for $35.8 million.
On November 20, Spotify’s CEO sold 75K shares for $34.8 million.
On November 26, Spotify’s CEO sold 75K shares for $36.1 million.
On December 4, Spotify’s CEO sold 75K shares for $37 million.
On December 11, Spotify’s CEO sold 60K shares for $28.3 million.
Deejay Alan Freed couldn’t dream of such riches. In fact, nobody in the history of music has made more money than the CEO of Spotify.
Taylor Swift doesn’t earn that much. Even after fifty years of concertizing, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger can’t match this kind of wealth.
At this point, I need to complain about the stupid major record labels who have empowered and supported Spotify during its long history. At some junctures, they have even been shareholders.
I’ve warned repeatedly that this is a huge mistake. Spotify is their adversary, not their partner. The longer they avoid admitting this to themselves, the worse things will get.
The music media isn’t much better—these new revelations came from a freelancer publishing in Harper’s, not from Rolling Stone or Billboard or Variety.
And I could say the same for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
Why didn’t they investigate this? Why don’t they care?
But I am grateful for independent journalism, which is now my main hope for the future.
Let’s turn to the bigger question: What do we do about this?
By all means, let’s name and shame the perpetrators. But we need more than that.
Congress should investigate ethical violations at music streaming businesses—just like they did with payola. Laws must be passed requiring full transparency. Even better, let’s prevent huge streaming platforms from promoting songs based on financial incentives.
I don’t do that as a critic. People sometimes try to offer me money for coverage, and I tell them off. It happened again this week, and I got upset. No honest person could take those payoffs.
Streaming platforms ought to have similar standards. And if they won’t do it voluntarily, legislators and courts should force their hand.
And let me express a futile wish that the major record labels will find a spine. They need to create an alternative—even if it requires an antitrust exemption from Congress (much like major league sports).
Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians. Let’s reclaim music from the technocrats. They have not proven themselves worthy of our trust.
If the music industry ‘leaders’ haven’t figured that out by now—especially after the latest revelations—we are in bad shape indeed.
There is a solution. DON'T GIVE ANY MONEY TO SPOTIFY. I IBUY CDS AND VINYL. And, once in a while, I'll splurge on a good cassette. In fact, I'm putting in the best of BTO right now. Analog isn't all that bad, and I got my pencil ready if the cassette tape gets in a bind.
"Congress should investigate ethical violations ..."
Dude.