Harper’s Magazine has an excerpt from Liz Pelly’s book on Spotify, and already we get another bombshell. The company conspired to farm out ghost content, often substituting for known artists, to pay out less to artists. That much was suspected by anyone listening to the platform, but the details are even more damning and far-reaching than you might imagine.
Just one excerpt:
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. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC) … It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
It’s essentially human-generated slop – with AI-assisted or entirely AI-generated content coming soon.
All of this has caught the attention of a union, the United Musicians and Allied Workers (they’re great – and also working on combating union busting at DistroKid):
‼️NEW: Liz Pelly reveals Spotify’s secret exploitation model Perfect Fit Content: thousands of songs created by underpaid, anonymous subcontractor musicians through shady production houses, prioritized by Spotify as the royalties improved its margins.
— UMAW (@umaw.bsky.social) December 18, 2024 at 12:51 PM
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It’s worth mentioning UMAW, as they already had a call to action that’s relevant here. US Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman introduced legislation that would add a streaming royalty and support musicians:
Sign on to Support the Living Wage for Musicians Act
Check the full article, as Liz goes into detail about how she researched the story and gory bits she discovered, and every word is essential.
The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s plot against musicians [Harper’s Magazine]
More reading on the topic from Estevan Carlos Benson, going into the matter of how this relates to the genre (and Epidemic Sounds):
Pop-Ambient: The Profitable Machine of Easy Listening 2.0
And like I said, this whole book will be a must-read:
Previously, in CDM telling you not to use Spotify: