Revealed: Spotify Really IS Cheating With Fake Music

The latest revelations about Spotify and fake music is maddening. It's also a symptom of a larger problem. But there is a silver lining.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

I just finished reading

Ted Gioia

’s coverage on how Spotify is gaming its own system by deliberately stuffing playlists with fake music they have commissioned, in order to pay less royalties to actual artists. Check it out:

The Ugly Truth About Spotify is Finally Revealed

Gioia credits journalist Liz Pelly for actually doing the investigative work. You can read her whole piece here. As per Pelly:

I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC).

I’m absolutely livid about this, and I think more people should publicize this. It drives me crazy how many times artists and creators are taken advantage of. As you’ll see in Gioia’s piece, it seems very coincidental that the timing of this program coincides with when Spotify began to record very healthy profits.

It took the company ten years to turn a profit. Then it starts cheating and things are looking up?

There’s so much we can draw from this situation when it come to the technological landscape right now and the internet. Because it’s not just Spotify. It’s the A.I. companies and the increasing challenges with good content on the internet. Search tools like Google are increasingly stuffed with ads, and more than that, its results are worse than ever before. Why? To try and keep you on the site rather than go somewhere else. Social media is so bad I don’t even need to explain it. And people are wondering when Amazon might try the same thing Spotify is doing with Amazon’s massive self-publishing business.

Here are some realities about the internet today that are becoming clearer and clearer:

1. ‘Scaling’ was / is a pipe dream. It’s all these tech companies ever talk about, but clearly there is a limit. Spotify obviously can’t afford to pay out royalties to artists (which were already super cheap). That’s why it’s doing what it’s doing. Yet it’s the biggest streaming service of the lot. What does that tell you? The business model doesn’t work. It’s almost twenty years now we’ve had music streaming, it's been tried and obviously it’s not working. (Well, it’s not working for everyone.)

2. The ‘disruptors’ can’t keep up with the disruption coming their way—and things are changing even quicker than ever before. Google is starting to lose massive market share with the emergence of A.I. search. And as a result, companies like Meta are building their own A.I. search to keep everyone tied into their one ecosystem.

3. Competition is up and services can’t cope. Movie and TV streaming has basically become like Cable back in the day. You now have to constantly jump between services to find what you want. It’s actually a good thing for competition even if it’s a pain but it shows us what’s coming. Coupled with A.I. and the increasingly bad search results from the likes of Google, it’s all about closing the internet and controlling the access points. It’s also increasingly about us needing to sift through junk to find what we need.

I’ve said for a long time that the internet has transformed from the information superhighway to the service superhighway. Slowly, over time, the information is becoming less available to us as services seek to find ways to centralize it, monetize access, and keep you on their platform.

The good

There is a massive silver lining I think. With the emergence of A.I. and all it can do with deepfakes and the like, the increasing junk on streaming services, publishing, and on internet search results; not to mention the tiresome nature of social media; people will increasingly rely on people for opinions, reporting, and good art.

This is why podcasts are so massive. While there is a tremendous amount of slop, note who is growing in the space and why. They’re growing largely because of word-of-mouth and reliability. With Silicon Valley and co. circling the internet to close it more and more so they become the middle man to provide its information to us; as they look to own and commodify the information; trust becomes of high value again.

Which is actually good. A society that values trust is a healthy society.

Here’s how I think this could look:

1. We will value the opinion of our friends and family more again as social media influencers lose relevance (which is happening, yay!). This means that maybe we will begin to exchange music and art with each other in real-life relationships (like it’s always been before streaming). If my friend’s opinion matters more than an influencer and an algorithm, then what happens is a culture begins to form. An offline culture. This is good news for live music, for magazines, for relationships and trust.

2. Publishers, A&R people, record companies etc. are going to actually need to go out and engage with communities again to find talent. No more just waiting for people to build social media platforms, sign them, and then just piggyback off all their efforts.

3. The internet is not going away. Artists will still have control of their online presence and connection, but perhaps this connection will happen online directly. This was always the dream of the internet. Cut out the middle man. The only way you build trust is direct. Services like Spotify have simply taken what was broken in the old model and put a new face on it. The dream was always to be able to connect directly with each other, not have to go through another service in order to do it. (This is why I also loved

   Ted Gioia
   ’s piece on why creatives will win by thinking small.)

4. Follower count on social media won’t mean nearly as much as the value of those followers and the trust you share with each other. It’s always better to have one person that cares about your art than a thousand bots! My hope is publishers and record companies realize that social media means precious little and start looking for talent to invest in rather than numbers to piggyback off of.

5. Journalists may have to start doing a proper job again to build trust. This movement has thankfully already begun to snowball. Why did people trust Joe Rogan more than CNN with the American election? The answer is obvious. Rogan has built trust with many people as someone who really does ask questions, while so many journalists refuse to ask questions but have become proselytizers for their political ideology.

Of course, all of this is idealistic, and no doubt most of my predictions will be wrong, but I think we’ll get somewhere along these lines. One thing I do know: a change is coming, and it would be good to grab hold of it.

Making music and art again

If Spotify fills itself with junk, it'll only be a matter of time before people move to something else. I can’t predict what that is. The idealist in me loves to think we’ll all gather around at each others house’s again to listen to the latest vinyl, but in reality, I also do love having practically anything I ever want to listen to at my fingertips. Plus, with kids, spending hours at a friends house listening to music is usually not possible!

The problem with the way things are now, when it comes to new music, I’m increasingly turning to friends and to authorities like online magazines, blogs, Substacks. It’s the same with literature. I think that is a good trend—one worth getting excited about. As social media ‘influencers’ increasingly mean nothing, algorithms increasingly have zero meaning, and search increasingly becomes frustrating to use, so more opportunity opens up to others who want to be involved in talking about, writing about, and being part of art and culture. This, too, is good for journalism. Maybe culture will become social and interpersonal again rather than what it is now—relegated to “one more scroll”.