Spotify has lengthy offered itself as a champion of artists and democratized music, a platform the place artists and listeners join inside a frictionless, meritocratic ecosystem. However behind the polished picture lies a troubling actuality: the Excellent Match Content material (PFC) program, a secretive initiative revealed in Liz Pelly’s forthcoming e-book, Temper Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Prices of the Excellent Playlist, which suggests revenue is the utmost precedence within the platform’s playlisting ecosystem.
This system, in response to Pelly’s reporting in Harper’s Journal, is designed to embed low-cost, royalty-free tracks into Spotify’s hottest mood- and activity-based playlists. Produced by a community of “ghost artists” working beneath pseudonyms, the tracks are commissioned with the intent to scale back the corporate’s royalty payouts to artists, per Pelly.
Piloted within the 2010s, the PFC initiative has since infiltrated a whole bunch of Spotify playlists, in response to Pelly’s investigation. The offers are stated to sometimes pay this system’s artists modest upfront charges whereas Spotify and its companions retain all rights to the music, thereby recognizing considerably extra revenue by selling the attain of ghost tracks on its platform.
This system’s results prolong past the person musicians who relinquish possession of their mental property. As soon as celebrated as avenues for inventive discovery, playlists have change into instruments for cost-cutting whereas musicians who’re making an attempt to make a livable wage off their craft are pushed apart in favor of disposable, low-cost content material.
The revelations about PFC echo comparable controversies surrounding Spotify’s “Discovery Mode” program, during which artists commerce royalty cuts for a lift in algorithmic promotion. Each initiatives seemingly exemplify the platform’s willingness to engineer its ecosystem in ways in which profit the corporate’s backside line on the expense of musicians.
“Spotify had lengthy marketed itself as the last word platform for discovery—and who was going to get enthusiastic about ‘discovering’ a bunch of inventory music?” Pelly defined. “Artists had been offered the concept streaming was the last word meritocracy—that the most effective would rise to the highest as a result of customers voted by listening. However the PFC program undermined all this.”
You possibly can learn Pelly’s full report right here.
