Spotify uses ghost artists to "shape listening behavior" and avoid paying real ones (original) (raw)
Spotify pads playlists with music by unknown artists, and has been accused of generating this music itself or using cheap library music to reduce the amount paid to artists. At Harpers, Liz Pelly, building on reporting by Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, reveals that the practice is pervasive. Spotify's plan for us is to deprecate well-known artists and push slop instead, cranked out as cheaply as possible to specifications so unethical that the library musicians working on it don't want to be named.
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. The program's name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. … But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. 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.
A good example of culture as a stochastic or statistical process. There's nothing to stop you turning off Spotify and listening to good music. There's nothing to stop you buying tapes from your favorite artist. There's nothing to stop you micromanaging Spotify when it feeds you slop. But the monopolization of attention by the most efficient and low-friction user experiences slowly chokes the commercial health and cultural vitality out of everything that feeds them.
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