Spotify accused of using ghost artists to minimise royalty payments
Spotify is using “ghost artists” to minimise royalty payments, according to a new report.
Various figures and reports have been closely observing Spotify for a series of months in an effort to unveil distinctive shortcomings with royalty payments in broader discussions about the platform’s poor and unfair treatment towards musical artists.
The latest report, published by Liz Pelly for Harper’s Magazine, alleged that Spotify is utilising ghost artists across various playlists for different moods and genres to create the illusion of “viral artists,” but when digging deeper, their identities were nowhere to be found.
Although Pelly notes that Spotify responded to the accusations earlier this year, arguing that their use of ghost artists was “categorically untrue, full stop,” it continued exploring the possibility that they might not have created the fake profiles but seemed to have still added them to specific playlists.
Several other reports backed up her claim, including one from music writer David Turner. Turner analysed an ‘Ambient Chill’ playlist on Spotify and found that it had been “wiped” of “well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins.” Instead, these had been replaced by Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that provides stock material often used for adverts, television programmes, and different types of video content.
As a result of these falsities and inconsistencies, fewer royalties are being distributed to legitimate artists, instead going to Perfect Fit Content (PFC) partners, a strategy editors have become more pressurised to implement, raising concerns about a lack of transparency with users regarding the origins of PFC music.
In 2023, over 150 playlists had been generated by those responsible for PFC, with almost all of them entirely made up of PFC. “Many of the playlist editors — whom Spotify had touted in the press as music lovers with encyclopedic knowledge — are uninterested in participating in the scheme,” the report stated, adding: “The company started to bring on editors who seemed less bothered by the PFC model.”
Spotify has struggled considerably to avoid negative backlash in recent months, especially with increasing ambiguity surrounding CEO Daniel Ek’s business model with playlisting and recent comments he made about “content” costing “close to zero” to make. Moreover, several artists have spoken against the platform in recent years, enhancing following Neil Young’s complete boycott in 2022.
Singer Kate Nash recently protested outside Life Nation and Spotify and released a statement arguing that the music industry has “failed” artists and is in “crisis.” She said: “The industry is in crisis, the music industry has failed artists, and is completely unsustainable.
Addressing her need to seek alternative sources of revenue, which led her to create an OnlyFans account, she continued: “This is a conversation about agency. And selling pictures of my bum is giving me the agency to reinvest in my creative economy. The music industry does not give me that agency.”
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