The Long History of the 2017 Spotify "Fake Music" Scandal

In July 2017 The Verge reported that popular streaming music service Spotify was employing a handful of musicians to produce over fifty tracks to fill out the company's "Peaceful Piano," "Calm Vibes," and "Music for Concentration" in-house playlists.¹ Other news outlets soon followed suit with articles such as "Are Spotify's 'Fake Artists' Any Good?" and "Spotify Is Accused of Creating Fake Artists—but What Is a Fake Artist?"² Since 2013 Spotify has featured playlists that the company curates for users throughout the platform as part of the company's branding. They are often the first thing that a user sees when opening the app and also appear in searches and in recommendations based on search results. They range widely from influential lists based on genre (e.g., "Rap Caviar") to innocuous lists based on time of day, season, or mood (e.g., "Throwback Thursday" and "Late Night Vibes"). These playlists are so popular, in fact, that many in the record industry view placement on them as the equivalent of being featured on a top terrestrial radio show in the late twentieth century.³ Like prominent placement on a top radio station, placement on a popular playlist translates to immediate income via increased exposure and listening royalties, especially important factors for middle-class and struggling musicians.

The artists named as "fake" by various music news outlets had no internet presence apart from Spotify, with vague, abstract artist logos often featuring clouds or two contrasting colors. Many tallied upward of over one million monthly listeners and were "discovered" on Spotify mood-based playlists. Unlike the majority of artists on Spotify, who use the platform to promote their live performances and sustain publics outside of streaming music, there is no information about these "fake artists" even on their Spotify "Artist Page"—pages that typically contain brief PR copy and artist biographies. A committed fan (in Spotify, this often translates into someone who "follows" these artists and can see new tracks on their user homepage) would never be able to see them in concert or learn about their history. Given all of these vagaries, these tracks were still produced by people. Calling the music at the center of this scandal "fake" is peculiar and speaks to a limited set of musical values centered around how artists operate in digital music markets and how these conditions have influenced the ways that producers and music industry insiders understand their status in recorded music.

Apart from Spotify success, these artists appear to be ghosts who have created tailored tracks to fulfill a need within the platform's mood-based lists and thereby rack up enviable listening ratings and revenue. As Tim Ingham first reported, "Tracks appear on Spotify under fake artist names. These fake artists are credited on Spotify with owning their own master rights. But they don't. Because they're made-up people."⁴ As Andrew Flanagan summarized for NPR, "Spotify is filling out some of its more experiential, moody playlists (like 'Piano & Chill') with bespoke music by artists that don't appear to, in practical terms, exist outside of the platform."⁵ Thus, the revelations about "fake artists" populating these playlists seemed to confirm musicians' most paranoid fears that the company's devaluation of musicians' labor would eventually lead to them being cut out of all the purported financial opportunities on the platform. As of this writing, anti-Spotify activists such as Radiohead front man Thom Yorke and jazz orchestra leader Maria Schneider still refuse to distribute their music on the service, stating that the company forces musicians to accept far less money for their work than they had received just a decade before. In anti-Spotify activist logic, the revelations about "fake music" on branded playlists proved that the company was denying "real musicians" (i.e., the musicians not solely working under the economic auspices of Spotify) a chance to increase their visibility and revenue; it confirmed the widespread fear among middle-class musicians that the company sought to eliminate them from the musical distribution process altogether.⁶ These fears take...