- Spotify is reportedly pushing ‘ghost artists’ into many playlists
- Ghost artists are like muzak: it’s music to be in the background
- Some employees declined to participate
Who makes the music you stream? On some Spotify playlists it might not be who you think. A new report in Harper’s Magazine says that a program called Perfect Fit Content, or PFC for short, is filling some playlists with cheaply produced content.
The report goes into great detail, but here’s the short version: Instead of giving individual artists some much-needed attention in some playlists, Spotify buys music from production companies that effectively create musical wallpaper. It’s music specifically designed to sound like other people’s music and cost Spotify as little as possible. And then Spotify’s own employees give that music an unnecessarily prominent place in playlists, at the expense of other artists.
That’s good for Spotify’s bottom line, because it means even less money goes to musicians; many music production companies pay a small lump sum without large royalties going to the musicians in the future. But as Harper’s report states, “it raises troubling questions for all of us who listen to music.”
Where are the ghost musicians on Spotify?
The playlists are primarily intended for listening in the background; think ‘chill instrumental beats’ and ‘lo-fi house’. And the music is pushed into those playlists to make each playlist more profitable, ie. to make musicians pay less. As Harpers’ Liz Pelly puts it, the idea is simple: why pay full royalties when people are only half-listening?
The problem with that is that Spotify’s idea of what constitutes background music is what many of us would simply call music. Think of ambient music, classical music, electronica, jazz, lo-fi beats… you get the idea.
The reason this is a problem is that there is already a lot of ambient, classical, electronica, jazz, lo-fi beats and other music on Spotify. And if that gets pushed out of the playlists in favor of music that Spotify has specifically sourced because it’s generic but cheaper, it will not only hurt the careers of musicians in those genres, but the genres themselves.
Pelly explains it very well in her piece:
“Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery – and who would get excited about ‘discovering’ a bunch of stock music? Artists had been taught the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy – that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program undermined all of this.”
However, Pelly adds that “Spotify denies that employees were encouraged to add PFC to playlists, and that playlist editors were unhappy with the program.” I recommend it read the full piece and the editors’ quotes, as well as Spotify’s responses to individual elements, to form your own opinion.
And now there’s AI…
When you look at Spotify through this lens, the embrace of AI – Spotify boss Daniek Ek, whose net worth is greater than any musician who has ever lived, is very enthusiastic about it – starts to look a lot less fun : Is the purpose of AI really to improve your listening experience, or is it to stream the musical equivalent of crappy AI visuals?
We know that many AI systems have been trained using what artists and artist organizations would characterize as widespread and blatant copyright infringement, to produce copies of the same artists’ work; it may not be as good, but it’s damn cheaper.
As I wrote last month, “Many years ago, a music industry expert told me that music companies didn’t care about music; they’d sell Brillo pads full of custard if that’s where the money was.” Swap custard pads for ghost artists and it’s the same deal.
As a former Spotify playlist editor told Pelly about AI pumping out audio just like the PFC program does: “I’m sure AI could do something now, and that’s pretty scary.”