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Spotify Denies Allegations It's Putting Fake Artists On Popular Playlists To Cut Costs (factmag.com)
Last year, music industry publication Music Business Worldwide (MBW) claimed Spotify was putting fake artists in some of its popular playlists. The publication listed 50 artists it claimed were not real. Why would they do such a thing? To keep royalty costs down. MBW claimed that Spotify "was asking producers to create music to specification and paying them a flat fee to own the track outright," reports FACT Magazine. "These tracks -- which MBW alleged were being used to bulk up numbers on ambient, chillout and piano playlists -- are said to be owned by Spotify so that the company could circumvent royalty payments on playlists that have millions of subscribers." From the report: The claims were brought to wider attention by a feature published by Vulture last week, which picked out acts called Deep Watch and Enno Aare as examples of "fake artists" that had racked up two million and 15 million streams despite having no public profile. In a statement given to Billboard last week, Spotify refuted the allegations made by both MBW and Vulture. "We do not and have never created 'fake' artists and put them on Spotify playlists," the company said. "Categorically untrue, full stop. We pay royalties -- sound and publishing -- for all tracks on Spotify, and for everything we playlist. We do not own rights, we're not a label, all our music is licensed from rightsholders and we pay them -- we don't pay ourselves. We do not own this content -- we license it and pay royalties just like we do on every other track." In a piece published yesterday, MBW challenged Spotify's statement, citing anonymous sources in the music business who claimed that the practice has been going on for a "long time."
Misrepresenting it? It's just an artist name (a lot of which are pseudonyms for "real" artists, anyway) and a track title, and a piece of music that is non-offensive and decent enough for background listening. What's so wrong about that?
Eat the rich.
Like every band during the sixties?
Seriously, that movie was a revelation to me about how the music industry has ALWAYS worked. There are literally dozens of bands from that time period that were, in reality, all putting out albums played by the same small crew of session dudes, just sometimes swapping in the lead vocalists from their actual band.
That pretty much holds for anything outside of hard rock to this day. A "distributor" being the ones to hire the session dudes and gals instead of a "label" really isn't that far fetched. Why not get a bigger piece of the pie if the music is that simple to create?
I'm just trying to understand why this is a legal issue. If the music exists, someone created it. Just because some label isn't getting a cut doesn't mean it's illegal. It just means someone found a way around the stranglehold the labels have on the industry. Again.