An MBW reader just blew open the Spotify fake artists story. Here’s what they have to say. – Music Business Worldwide

Baby Bears

Mysan

Vaggvisor

There are hundreds of similar examples if you keep digging, and I should stress, not just by Sony but by all major groups (for example Lofi Fruits Music and Chill Fruits Music with a third artist pseudonym, because this generates streaming activity not only via search but also algorithmic programming like Release Radar and Daily Mix on Spotify.

The songwriters and producers of these tracks are either paid a fixed fee per track or a combination of a low advance and reduced royalty rate and it works because these “labels” can guarantee millions of streams through their own network of search engine optimized DSP playlists and YouTube channels.

4) DSPs

 So we’ve established that pretty much all significant stakeholders in the industry have identified “mood” or “lifestyle” music as a strategic opportunity. So what are the DSPs approach? First of all, they realized that this is a significant enough segment that it’s worthy of their time and resources. Meaning, a really significant enough share of streams is already being generated by so called “mood content”.

Second, DSPs clearly have an incentive to clean up the poor quality SEO/Fake stream generated content that has been driven by click farms and other semi-fraudulent activity for years. Because, just like with label owned playlists, it turns out that DSPs believe the user experience will improve if they curate their own Hits and Genre playlists as opposed to letting the major labels do the job for them because of their inevitable bias for their own content. It inevitably also gives DSPs leverage because if they control what people listen to, rightsholders will be more dependent on them. Certainly, licensing negotiations in 2022 would be very different if major labels were still the main playlist influencers on platforms like Spotify.

Clearly Spotify, Amazon, uChill putting out lo-fi remakes of UMG catalog tracks at bulk which is an indicator that majors are starting to realize there is a real market here.

5) The fake artists

At the end of the day, fake artists are of course real songwriters, instrumentalists and music producers with varying degrees of talent.

These are people who have always tried to find ways to make a living off their music, you might be a pianist or guitarist who is used as a work-for-hire by bigger artists and paid a fee per hour, per track or live show. You might be a somewhat successful pop producer or songwriter with a decent cut rate even working with big artists.

You might be a promising bedroom electronic/hiphop producer who did a remix once for Deadmau5 or a successful touring electronic DJ getting into your 40s and starting to think about the next step. You might be writing tracks for K-pop acts knowing that usually about 10% of them gets picked up by an artist or label and actually starts generating royalties for you a year or two later.

Regardless of who you are, you are always going to be looking for new ways to make ends meet. And you probably are not primarily driven by becoming an “artist” or having a career playing live.

For these people, whether you are offered to make tracks for one of the majors secret mood music projects, by labels like Strange Fruits or Chilledcow or by Firefly, they are all probably viable ways of making a buck. In fact, many of these people are doing not just one but multiple of these. And are probably better off as a result of it, because it gives them flexibility (without being locked to an exclusive label or publishing deal) and the ability to benchmark different ways of making a living off your talent as a musician.

One perspective here is that many musicians in this category are among the most fucked over in terms of the share of revenues they have received from their work in the past.

Finally. While it is easy to find labels, writers and producers who have fake artist pseudonyms with millions of streams, there are also tens of thousands of releases that have very unimpressive numbers and there are not really any guarantees that your track is going to do well. And if you decide to partner with labels who are great at gaming algorithms and search, there is of course the very apparent risk that your streams will quickly go down to zero once DSPs optimize their services to mitigate these exploits.

So who’s really losing in this equation? 

Possibly, older out of touch-artists who think music should always be something meaningful and “culturally important” and are perhaps – just slightly – butthurt that no one cares, or that other people have figured out another way to be successful.

Perhaps major labels who are a bit late in the game and will likely have to acquire smaller labels to start competing (just like when Warner acquired Topsify when they realized UMG and Sony were way ahead in the label owned playlist-race).

And like you have pointed out in your articles, certainly Swedish labels and creators have benefitted more than their peers from other countries. This is perhaps not reflective of the current situation, there are certainly loads of non-Scandinavian companies growing rapidly in this segment, and others that are investing their way into the space, but this entire category (just like label playlisting, playlist apps and well, streaming in general) clearly over-index towards the Nordics because it’s where it all began. This was also true for mainstream Swedish EDM and pop acts that grew to global fame because of the Nordics relative impact over the global streaming charts at the time, but will get “fixed” over time.

It’s not a coincidence that there have been no new Kygos, Aviciis or Swedish House mafias in the last 5 years. After all, all the Heads of Content at all the main DSPs are American so I am sure that eventually we will go back to the normalcy of North American dominance 😉

It’s certainly an interesting time to be alive in the industry 🙂 For me personally, Discovery Mode and similar promotional schemes are perhaps more controversial than the mood music space because it presents a viable threat – or opportunity – depending on which side you’re on, to really change the way pricing works in the streaming era. It is after all, an anomaly that all music is monetized at the same rate and it seems inevitable that rights holders will start to discount parts of their catalogue in return for more visibility as they always have in the best whether it was via discounted iTunes albums, CDs or compilations.

Major labels have an inclination to give away their content for free if they believe it can grow their market share and naively believe they will benefit because of course in the end the real winner is the DSP who don’t care who ends up with more market share as long as their overall royalty rates are moving down. Hoping to read more about your perspective on this topic in the future.

Best of luck,
Anonymous MBW reader

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Music Business Worldwide