> The program, according to Pelly’s reporting in Harper’s Magazine, is designed to embed low-cost, royalty-free tracks into Spotify’s most popular mood- and activity-based playlists. Produced by a network of “ghost artists” operating under pseudonyms, the tracks are commissioned with the intent to reduce the company’s royalty payouts to artists, per Pelly.

https://edm.com/news/spotify-using-ghost-artists-minimize-ro...

Spotify hires musicians to churn out content that fits certain criteria. see https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

Internally, they refer to it as “perfect fit content” (pfc).

It used to just be stuff like white noise and rain sounds, but it has expanded to essentially be a modern Muzak replacement.

For situations when people don really want “music” and just need “contextually appropriate aesthetically pleasing sound”

There are artists that Spotify has different deals with. Spotify promotes their music in their playlists, but the artists get a much smaller cut of the profits in exchange. Win-win for everybody.

This only happens in genres where most listeners don't care about the artists they're listening to, think "chillout", "focus" or "easy listening." That kind of music is a commodity, Taylor Swift (or Metallica or Mozzart or whatever) is not. This has been proven.

My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money, as people often play that kind of music and never turn it off. Because Spotify pays per listen, the user who attentively listens to their favorite artist a few times a week is much better for them than somebody who has "chillout" playing on their echo 24/7.

I'm not saying they are doing it now, but what's stopping them from generating their own tracks? What's to stop them from creating some bullshit company to generate AI slop and then licensing music from themselves at fractions of what they'd pay a real artist just to keep up the illusion so that real artists don't leave their platform?

If a corporation can do something that will make them more money than they'd make not doing it you should expect them to do the profitable thing. Corporations don't care about ethics or even the law. Maximizing shareholder value is their purpose. They exist only to take from the many and give to the few. It's not a conspiracy theory to assume that they'll be doing exactly what they are designed to do.

Not a conspiracy theory. Spotify hires session musicians (pre-AI) to pay a flat fee for hours of background music.

Since many high volume Spotify users just want “something jazzy” in the background, it helps them reduce royalties.

It's not really a conspiracy theory. YouTube users can use royalty-free music, it stands to reason Spotify would have the same (potentially internally) to decrease costs.

"Why pay royalties if it's just going to be BGM for a massage parlor?" could be their reasoning.

Yet another person who plays the bogeyman card of "conspiracy theory" when what is described is garden variety corruption, only takes a trivial amount of secret coordination in a group smaller than your average terrorist cell, and could probably even be defended as legal with a small legal team (Spotify probably has a big one).

There are a billion ways you could cash in on this. A dead easy one is "music written for hire by a company you own".

Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is not a conspiracy theory. Quit trying to tar every proposed view of the world you disagree with with that label. You're just making it easier for the actual grand conspiracy theorists.