A story about how Spotify creates fake musicians with fake songs to pay less royalties to real musicians for their real songs.
Spotify’s official playlists often feature songs by unknown artists with dozens or even hundreds of millions of plays. For example, Ana Olgica. According to her profile on Spotify, she is “the daughter of the famous Macedonian violinist Alexander Olgik” (there is not a word about this violinist on the Internet), her music “perfectly conveys the melancholy of the Balkan heritage”.
Ana Olgica songs are very popular on Spotify and often appear in all kinds of playlists. But here’s the bad luck – this performer is not present in any social network, she does not have live recordings and interviews, and a few photos are pulled from standard stock selections. There is music – there is no musician. And there are plenty of such mysterious “musicians” with hundreds of millions of plays in the Spotify catalog.
Most of them are owned by Epidemic Sound, a Stockholm-based label. By coincidence, Spotify is also headquartered there. By an even more pure coincidence, both companies are sponsored by the investment fund Creandum. In addition, in the professional musical environment Epidemic Sound is known for absolutely draconian terms of cooperation, according to which a musician is deprived of all rights to his creations, including the opportunity to receive royalties.
The following pattern emerges: Spotify, through its hand-made label Epidemic Sound, buys songs from unknown musicians on the cheap, then invents fake artists for these songs, draws covers, gives new titles and uploads them to the service, arranging aggressive rotation in official playlists. Tasty royalties from hundreds of millions of plays go into Epidemic Sound’s pocket, i.e. Spotify
But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
As you know, Spotify royalties are directly related to the number of listens: the more popular an artist’s songs, the more royalties he receives. By jamming playlists with its fake songs, Spotify reduces the number of listens to songs of real musicians, thus paying them less royalties. For the giants of the pop industry with billions of streams, all this mouse fuss is invisible. But such a “business model” simply steals from independent performers and puts them on the brink of survival.
But that’s not all.
Last year, Spotify announced “indie artist support” and rolled out a new collaboration scheme: songs from niche musicians will get more frequent hits on official playlists (= get more streams), but royalties will … yes, less. Simply put, Spotify has used its own fake songs to leverage independent artists to agree to unfavorable terms of cooperation.
Characteristically, the new initiative appeared during the coronavirus pandemic, when musicians were physically unable to make a living from concerts. To whom the war, and to whom the mother is dear. Well, nothing, it’s all little things. The main thing is that Spotify defended democracy and banned Donald Trump.
