According to a detailed new report from Liz Pelly for Harper’s Magazine, Spotify is supplementing playlists with “ghost artists” as a means of decreasing the amount of royalties to pay and increasing overall profit margins. Known as Perfect Fit Content, this practice allegedly primarily impacts playlists in genres like jazz, classical, ambient, and lo-fi hip-hop.
The PFC program, which was introduced to Spotify editors in 2017, is reportedly designed as a way to prioritize profitability — by partnering with a “web” of production companies, many of which are located outside the US, it appears that Spotify has successfully increased the percentage of total streams towards music that is cheaper for the platform to host. Fewer royalties are paid out to real artists, while payments go to the PFC partners. The PFC partners create music to be shared under hundreds of artist profiles, many of which are completely empty and generate inconclusive searches upon further inspection.
The report includes insights from former Spotify staff, such as a playlist editor who explained that many employees didn’t initially know where the music is coming from; the internal attitude became, “If the metrics went up, then let’s just keep replacing more and more, because if the user doesn’t notice, then it’s fine.”
Pelly, who has been digging into this story for years, even traveled to Sweden in 2023 to meet with staff at local outlet Dagens Nyheter, a publication that helped revive allegations of ghost artists. Their findings revealed that around twenty songwriters are behind the work of more than five hundred “artists,” and that thousands of their tracks on Spotify have been streamed millions of times. One of these artists features a “completely made up” bio.
But not everyone at Spotify is on board with the program. “Many of the playlist editors — whom Spotify had touted in the press as music lovers with encyclopedic knowledge — are uninterested in participating in the scheme,” the report details. “The company started to bring on editors who seemed less bothered by the PFC model.”
Some of the platform’s most popular playlists, including those titled Ambient Relaxation, Deep Focus, Cocktail Jazz, and Bossa Nova Dinner, are found to be almost entirely made up of PFC music. Additionally, many of the now-departed staff members believe the company could be moving towards AI running the program.
While Spotify has repeatedly denied allegations of creating music in-house, characterizing these claims as “categorically untrue, full stop,” their cause was not helped by CEO Daniel Ek, who oddly remarked that “creating content” costs “close to zero” earlier this year.
The report arrives in a time where Spotify is under extra scrutiny for the division between human-made and AI-generated products; many users expressed disappointment over this year’s lackluster edition of Spotify Wrapped, which leaned heavily into AI and felt largely devoid of its celebratory personality. What’s more, with Ek still taking home a massive paycheck, no artist on the platform comes anywhere close to making as much through royalties – not even the most-streamed artist of 2024, Taylor Swift.