<
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/>
"I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was
new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major
labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had
just been published. Within a few days, the owner of an independent record
label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious
phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie
music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists
with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or
fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even
speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when
playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for
independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.
At first, it sounded to me like a conspiracy theory. Surely, I thought, these
artists were just DIY hustlers trying to game the system. But the tips kept
coming. Over the next few months, I received more notes from readers,
musicians, and label owners about the so-called fake-artist issue than about
anything else. One digital strategist at an independent record label worried
that the problem could soon grow more insidious. “So far it’s happening within
a genre that mostly affects artists at labels like the one I work for, or
Kranky, or Constellation,” the strategist said, referring to two long-running
indie labels.* “But I doubt that it’ll be unique to our corner of the music
world for long.”
By July, the story had burst into public view, after a
Vulture article
resurfaced a year-old item from the trade press claiming that Spotify was
filling some of its popular and relaxing mood playlists—such as those for
“jazz,” “chill,” and “peaceful piano” music—with cheap fake-artist offerings
created by the company. A Spotify spokesperson, in turn, told the music press
that these reports were “categorically untrue, full stop”: the company was not
creating its own fake-artist tracks. But while Spotify may not have created
them, it stopped short of denying that it had added them to its playlists. The
spokesperson’s rebuttal only stoked the interest of the media, and by the end
of the summer, articles on the matter appeared from
NPR and the
Guardian,
among other outlets. Journalists scrutinized the music of some of the artists
they suspected to be fake and speculated about how they had become so popular
on Spotify. Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used
analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely
been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose
music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers
a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material
often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video
content."
Via
Garbage Day: Elon Musk is, unfortunately, still important
<
https://www.garbageday.email/p/elon-musk-is-unfortunately-still-important>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
