Liz Pelly and Spotify’s “ghost artists for hire”
Journalist Liz Pelly joined WNYC’s John Schaefer last night at the New York Public Library to discuss her book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
Pelly’s new work of what she calls “reported criticism” is key to understanding the inequities of today’s streaming music landscape and how Spotify deepens those inequities with tactics that prioritize the ISP’s revenue and ultimately devalue art. To wit, Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek has sold company shares worth nearly $700 million in total since 2023, while a new Duetti report shows that the platform pays artists $3 per 1,000 streams.
At the NYPL, Schaefer asked Pelly about Spotify and its so-called “fake artists,” a subject explored in chapter five of Mood Machine. This particular topic “took over her life for a year.” She explained:
For years the music business trade press had been speculating that Spotify had been filling its most popular mood and activity playlists with tracks by artists who didn't exist. The music business press referred to them as “fake artists.”
You would see people talking about this on social media a lot. “My sleep playlist … I noticed that all the tracks on this playlist are made by artists whose album art is made with generative AI, and I’m trying to research this artist and I can’t find any information about them online, and they don’t have any bios. I think these artists might not be real.” That kind of thing.
And then, in 2022, at the Swedish daily newspaper DN, their tech journalists did a big investigation into this. I should say that interviewing Swedish journalists was a really important source for this book and an important part of the research process. And they were able to were able to access some Swedish copyright documents and piece together that in certain cases there was this really small group of Swedish songwriters who were responsible for hundreds of artist monikers and thousands of tracks under those artist monikers that were getting really prime placement in all of these first-party playlists, playlists that were seemingly edited by in-house curators at Spotify. So clearly, something was up.
Through Pelly’s reporting—a portion of the more than one hundred interviews she conducted for Mood Machine and a review of internal docs and communications at Spotify—she found that what subscribers and news outlets were calling a “fake artists” program was actually quite real, the distinction being that there was nothing fake about the artists at the center of it.
The Spotify initiative, a clandestine project called Perfect Fit Content (PFC), saw the service partnering with a list of production companies from which they license music. “Those companies in turn have contracts with musicians who crank out the tracks for them,” Pelly told Schaefer.
The songs performed by these freelance musicians end up with prominent slots in the brand’s most popular playlists under the names of artists who simply don’t exist.
In an excerpt of Mood Machine that ran in the January 2025 issue of Harper’s, the author unpacked the implications of this initiative:
The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
The New York Public Library’s event with Liz Pelly and John Schaefer is on YouTube. More information on Mood Machine, which the Guardian suggests “may be the most depressing and enraging book about music published this year,” can be found at her site.
