“Mood Machine” probes the mysteries of the Spotify playlist
When it comes to music streaming subscriptions, Spotify has the lion’s share of the market. According to Digital Music News, the Swedish streamer occupies a little over a third of the U.S. market, and with that market share comes more than a bit of influence in the music industry.
And the main vehicle for that power? The Spotify algorithm and playlist, which decides what shows up on a user’s homepage or what song plays next when you let the app just run. In her new book, “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist,” music journalist Liz Pelly takes a look at what goes into the Spotify algorithm and how it has shaped the music industry.
In the following excerpt from the book, Pelly examines one particular side effect of Spotify’s endless stream: the rise of “ghost artists,” or artists with fake profiles, which, in Pelly’s reporting, may mask connections to the streamer.
It was first reported in 2016 by Music Business Worldwide. Spotify had allegedly been directly sourcing prefab instrumentals to “fit certain genres and themes, including jazz, chill, and peaceful piano playing,” which producers would make in bulk and release under one-off monikers. According to that early investigation, Spotify had licensed these tracks directly from production companies for a cheaper royalty rate, and thus would promote them on its relaxing editorial mood playlists (with millions of followers) to protect its bottom line. The company responded by vehemently denying that these were “fake artists,” but not the existence of the broader, hidden arrangement. Spotify claimed they had “found a need for content” and were simply looking for suppliers to help give listeners what they wanted. But were listeners creating that need, or had Spotify created it?
In my early days of reporting on the streaming economy, I received more emails about the so-called “fake artist” issue than any other related topic. Initially, the owner of a long-running NYC independent record label dropped me a line, letting me know about a mysterious phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern in the indie label scene. “Is it majors hiring studio musicians to make ambient tracks to collect a windfall of streaming cash, or Spotify themselves?” he wondered. “Maybe just a payola scenario but either way alarming.” Spotify wanted these no-name ambient tracks to float on by in the background, but to those actually listening, they stuck right out.
A second independent record label staffer, who worked digital distribution for a long-running ambient and electronic imprint, expressed some similar concerns to me at the time. “I’m not naive enough to believe that streaming is a meritocracy,” he said. “Far from it. But at some point there’s a trend of interventionism toward these producers, which isn’t getting extended to ‘actual’ independent artists as often anymore, and isn’t being acknowledged or explained. . . . The concept of Spotify or streaming as the pragmatic marketplace where artists will profit from their work in itself is perverted by this practice.”
“So far it’s happening within a genre that mostly affects artists at labels like the ones I work for, or Kranky, or Constellation,” the staffer said, referring to long-running indie labels. “But I doubt that it’ll be unique to our corner of the music world for long.”
At first, I simply referred to them as “mystery viral artists” — they often had millions of plays, prime placements on mood lists, but no bio, no website, no digital footprint anywhere else. You could not Google these artists. Trusty citizen investigators on Reddit dug up example after example of artist pages that were clearly fake, but had Spotify’s equivalent to bluecheck verification. There were red flags all over the platform — something weird was going on.
For years, there were more questions than answers — until a 2022 investigation by the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter brought new weight to the allegations. By corroborating scraped streaming data with documents retrieved from the Swedish copyright organization STIM, the newspaper revealed that only twenty songwriters were behind over five hundred artist names, and that between them, Spotify was flooded with thousands of their tracks streamed millions of times.
On a summer afternoon in the lobby of the paper’s Stockholm office, I met with technology editor Linus Larsson, who pulled up the Spotify bio of a supposed artist named Ekfat. Since 2019, a handful of tracks had been released under this moniker, mostly with Firefly Entertainment listed as the label. They appeared on official Spotify editorial playlists like “Lofi House” and “Chill Instrumental Beats.” One of the tracks had over 3 million streams; at the time of this writing, the number has surpassed 4 million. But Larsson was particularly amused by the fairly elaborate artist bio, which he started to read out loud. It called Ekfat a classically trained Icelandic beatmaker who graduated from the Reykjavik Music Conservatory, joined the “Lo-Fi Rockers Crew” in 2017, and released music only on limited-edition cassettes until 2019.
“Completely made up,” Larsson said. “These are three Swedish guys who make songs in different constellations. This is probably the most absurd example because they really tried to make him into the coolest music producer that you can find.” In retrospect, the bio sort of sounds like it could have been written using generative AI. It was just one example of what was all over Spotify at that point, in 2023: “A range of artists, in genres such as hip-hop beats, anonymous jazz and low-key piano music, are simply not real,” Larsson wrote in his DN exposé. “What there is, however, is a hidden million-dollar industry with an anonymous Karlstad company at the center, where the management has close personal connections to a former Spotify manager.”
Firefly Entertainment was so enmeshed in the scheme, it had grown its revenue tenfold in just a few years, fueled by streaming royalties. Later, in my own interviews, former Spotify employees would characterize Firefly as a “PFC provider.”
While former employees gave conflicting reports on the exact managers that created the PFC program, the Spotify-Firefly connection emerged largely thanks to a longtime personal relationship between Nick Holmstén, the founder of Tunigo who would eventually become Spotify’s global head of music, and Fredrik Hult, the founder of Firefly Entertainment. Hult and Holmstén grew up in the same town in the west of Sweden, and their many years of close friendship are documented across Hult’s Instagram page: family vacations, dinners out on the town, visits to the Spotify office. In one of Hult’s photos, he poses with some Firefly producers at Spotify’s 2018 Best New Artist Grammy party.
“It wasn’t a coincidence that this company had all these spots on the popular playlists,” Larsson told me. Rummaging through the depths of Discogs one day, I stumbled upon an even deeper connection between the two: they had played together in a late-nineties powerpop band called Apple Brown Betty, releasing a couple of studio records. There’s a video on YouTube: Spotify’s once global head of music on vocals, founder of the most mysterious fake-artist company on drums.
Besides the journalists at DN, music and media people in Sweden did not really want to talk about all this fake-artist stuff. In Stockholm, I found the address of one of the Swedish ghost labels and tried to knock on the door — no luck. I met someone who knew a guy who maybe ran one of these production companies, but he didn’t want to talk. A local businessman would only reveal that he worked in the “functional music space,” and got so cagey when I told him about this book, that I just had to laugh.
Despite the obvious signs, Spotify had gone to great lengths to downplay its formal relationships with the production music companies fueling its PFC program. And the licensees, too, seem to have been sworn to secrecy. It made sense. Because once you started pulling, the whole web of Spotify’s curation universe unraveled.
Copyright 2024 by Liz Pelly. From “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” by Liz Pelly. Reprinted by permission of One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.