In response to an in depth new report from Liz Pelly for Harper’s Journal, Spotify is supplementing playlists with “ghost artists” as a method of reducing the quantity of royalties to pay and growing general revenue margins. Often called Good Match Content material, this apply allegedly primarily impacts playlists in genres like jazz, classical, ambient, and lo-fi hip-hop.
The PFC program, which was launched to Spotify editors in 2017, is reportedly designed as a option to prioritize profitability — by partnering with a “internet” of manufacturing firms, lots of that are positioned outdoors the US, it seems that Spotify has efficiently elevated the proportion of whole streams in direction of music that’s cheaper for the platform to host. Fewer royalties are paid out to actual artists, whereas funds go to the PFC companions. The PFC companions create music to be shared underneath a whole bunch of artist profiles, lots of that are fully empty and generate inconclusive searches upon additional inspection.
The report consists of insights from former Spotify workers, resembling a playlist editor who defined that many workers didn’t initially know the place the music is coming from; the interior angle grew to become, “If the metrics went up, then let’s simply preserve changing increasingly, as a result of if the person doesn’t discover, then it’s high quality.”
Pelly, who has been digging into this story for years, even traveled to Sweden in 2023 to fulfill with workers at native outlet Dagens Nyheter, a publication that helped revive allegations of ghost artists. Their findings revealed that round twenty songwriters are behind the work of greater than 5 hundred “artists,” and that hundreds of their tracks on Spotify have been streamed thousands and thousands of instances. Certainly one of these artists encompasses a “fully made up” bio.
However not everybody at Spotify is on board with this system. “Lots of the playlist editors — whom Spotify had touted within the press as music lovers with encyclopedic information — are bored with taking part within the scheme,” the report particulars. “The corporate began to carry on editors who appeared much less bothered by the PFC mannequin.”
A number of the platform’s hottest playlists, together with these titled Ambient Rest, Deep Focus, Cocktail Jazz, and Bossa Nova Dinner, are discovered to be nearly completely made up of PFC music. Moreover, most of the now-departed workers members consider the corporate could possibly be shifting in direction of AI operating this system.
Whereas Spotify has repeatedly denied allegations of making music in-house, characterizing these claims as “categorically unfaithful, full cease,” their trigger was not helped by CEO Daniel Ek, who oddly remarked that “creating content material” prices “near zero” earlier this 12 months.
The report arrives in a time the place Spotify is underneath additional scrutiny for the division between human-made and AI-generated merchandise; many customers expressed disappointment over this 12 months’s lackluster version of Spotify Wrapped, which leaned closely into AI and felt largely devoid of its celebratory persona. What’s extra, with Ek nonetheless taking residence a large paycheck, no artist on the platform comes wherever shut to creating as a lot by means of royalties – not even the most-streamed artist of 2024, Taylor Swift.