Tech

Spotify is creating its own songs and crediting them to fake artists

by Jeremy Mersereau

Apparently not content with disrupting the digital music ecosystem by hitting back at timed exclusives, Swedish streaming giant Spotify is also engaging in an unusual experiment to work out how to further transmogrify the landscape surrounding modern music consumption.

Recently, Spotify has started to make its own music. According to Music Business Worldwide, sources have revealed that Spotify is paying music producers to create songs along specific guidelines, with the master copyright going to Spotify after recording. The songs then appear on Spotify’s curated playlists, credited to fake artists. Though the artists are presented as being real musicians, with their own artist pages and discographies, they’re completely made up, but that doesn’t hurt their streaming performance – at least five Spotify-penned tracks have more than 500,000 plays, and at least one has over a million.

Just how do these fake tracks rack up those kind of numbers? Is Spotify creating their own counterfeit pop stars, S1m0ne-style? Is Selena Gomez a replicant? Is this the future of music? Calm down: most of Spotify-owned music is instrumental, and the songs usually fall under the umbrella of jazz, easy listening, and classical, and then appear on the multitude of playlists Spotify curates focusing on these genres and moods.

So what is Spotify’s end goal with these fake songs? Sure, it must be nice, as the rights holder, to pay yourself for streams on music you own, but that can’t be all Spotify is mindful of as it adds more of its own music to its playlists. It’s probably no coincidence that Spotify is experimenting at a time when it’s out of contract with all three major labels: Universal, Sony, and Warner, and is looking to drive down the percentage of revenue it pays out to rights holders, which now stands at 55%. Spotify knows original content is the true path to victory over its streaming rivals one way or another, and that doesn’t just have to mean bankrolling Metallica documentaries.