We’ve Been Hearing About Spotify ‘Ghost Artists’ for Years — Now There’s an Entire Book Dedicated to the Subject

We’ve been hearing about Spotify “ghost artists” for years. Now, there’s an entire book dedicated to the subject – exploring, among other things, the platform’s relationships with the companies responsible for pumping out the involved tracks.

Author Liz Pelly penned a preview of that book, entitled Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. As its title suggests, the 288-page work, scheduled to release on January 7th, will zero in specifically on fake artists’ positioning on Spotify-curated playlists.

We’ve long covered the multifaceted topic (and adjacent areas) – with related 2024 developments including an indictment over an alleged $10 million royalty heist in the States, besides a trial in Denmark centering on a different alleged fake stream operation.

Of course, not all fake profiles generate royalties from illicit plays; the playlists charted in Mood Machine seemingly revolve, in the main, around background listening. But artificial or not, the streams in question divert royalties and promotional opportunities from actual artists.

Keeping the focus (in line with Mood Machine) on recent years’ revelations about Spotify and fake artists’ positioning on first-party playlists, Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter (DN) in 2022 shed light on a pertinent alleged arrangement between the service and Karlstad-based Firefly Entertainment.

Then, Svenska Dagbladet last year described Swedish gangs’ alleged use of fake Spotify streams as a “money-laundering ATM.” And a March 2024 report unmasked Swedish artist Johan Röhr as the individual who’d allegedly pumped out the music behind north of 650 artist profiles and some 15 billion cumulative streams.

Looking to take those findings to the next level, Pelly by her own account visited Stockholm in search of additional information. “Besides the journalists at DN, no one in Sweden wanted to talk about the fake artists,” the author summed up.

That initial lack of details kicked off an over year-long deep dive into fake artists, their continued presence on high-profile playlists, and the role of a select few companies in providing the appropriate tracks, per Pelly.

In short, the in-depth investigation, complete with ex-employee interviews, a review of “internal Spotify records,” and much more, purportedly uncovered “an elaborate internal program.”

Dubbed “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC), said program involves Spotify “partnerships with a web of production companies,” with “a team of employees working to seed…tracks on playlists across the platform” so as to maximize the prevalence of lower-cost music.

(Following early in-house pushback, Spotify allegedly brought “on editors who seemed less bothered by the PFC model.”)

To put it mildly, further diluting the abysmal per-stream royalty rate (and claiming valuable playlist spots) is far from ideal for proper artists, and particularly indie and unsigned talent.

On this front, Spotify reportedly responded by maintaining that it doesn’t “‘promise placement on any playlists’” in licensing agreements.

However, that position seemingly contradicts the findings of an investigation from the U.K.’s CMA, which spelled out that certain licensing pacts “contain obligations on the music streaming service to ensure that a major’s share of tracks within some playlists broadly corresponds to its overall share of streams.” And to state the obvious, major-signed acts are racking up streams faster than ever.

In any event, Mood Machine will reportedly explore internal pushes to bring the above-outlined PFC tracks to playlists. Notably, the pushes weren’t (and presumably aren’t) confined to works attributable to the aforementioned Firefly or Epidemic Sound, which likewise operates out of Sweden.

“For years, Firefly Entertainment and Epidemic Sound dominated media speculation about Spotify’s playlist practices. But internal messages revealed they were just two among at least a dozen PFC providers,” Pelly previewed.

The book will also feature comments from the musicians who made the PFC songs – though looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, AI appears poised to take over the pernicious gigs. That would make an already-raw deal even worse for indie and unsigned acts, several of whom have fended off fraud allegations under Spotify’s revamped royalty model to boot.