Controversy over fake artists on Spotify
Based on Wikipedia: Controversy over fake artists on Spotify
Somewhere on Spotify right now, a jazz pianist named "Marcus Bloom" is racking up millions of streams. You've probably never heard of him. Neither has anyone in the music industry. That's because Marcus Bloom doesn't exist.
He's what insiders call a "fake artist"—a pseudonym attached to music commissioned specifically to fill Spotify's curated playlists. And he's far from alone. By some counts, over 500 such phantom musicians populate the platform, their combined streams numbering in the billions.
This isn't a glitch or an accident. It's a deliberate business strategy that Spotify has spent nearly a decade denying, even as mounting evidence suggests it sits at the heart of how the company makes money.
The First Whispers
The story begins in August 2016, when Music Business Worldwide dropped a bombshell. The publication reported that Spotify was paying musicians flat fees to create tracks in various genres—jazz, ambient, peaceful piano—which would then be listed under fabricated names. The sources were solid but bound by non-disclosure agreements, which meant the publication couldn't name names. What they could say was tantalizing: at least five Spotify-controlled tracks had surpassed 500,000 streams each, with one breaking a million.
At the time, it seemed like an experiment. Maybe a one-off cost-cutting measure. The music industry shrugged and moved on.
One year later, Vulture Magazine revived the story. Their reporting added a crucial financial detail: the flat fees Spotify paid for this commissioned music were a fraction of what artists typically earned through streaming royalties. If you could get millions of streams on your own playlists—and Spotify's curated playlists were being listened to by half the platform's users at any given moment—why share those royalty payments with actual musicians?
Spotify's response was swift and categorical.
We do not and have never created 'fake' artists and put them on Spotify playlists. 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.
Music Business Worldwide wasn't buying it. They dissected Spotify's statement and noticed something peculiar: the company had denied creating fake artists themselves, but they hadn't denied that fake artists existed on their platform. A European musician soon came forward, telling the publication about a deal to create tracks for fabricated artists that Spotify would then place on genre-based playlists.
The publication went deeper. They obtained a list of pseudonyms and verified them. All fifty names existed on Spotify. All had tracks exceeding 500,000 streams. Combined, these phantom artists had accumulated over 520 million streams.
Half a billion listens. Zero interviews. No Wikipedia pages. No Instagram accounts. No concert appearances. Just... nothing.
The Epidemic Sound Connection
Music writer David Turner decided to investigate Spotify's "Ambient Chill" playlist that same year. He was puzzled by a simple question: why were legitimate ambient musicians like Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins being edged out by artists nobody had heard of?
Turner traced much of the mysterious music to a company called Epidemic Sound. If you've never heard of them, you've definitely heard their work. Epidemic Sound provides stock music—the kind of generic background tracks that play during YouTube videos, commercials, and corporate presentations. It's music designed specifically to be forgettable, to fill space without demanding attention.
Now it was filling Spotify's most popular playlists.
Around this time, music journalist Liz Pelly began hearing whispers from industry contacts. The owner of an independent record label in New York told her about a rumor making the rounds: Spotify was systematically populating its high-traffic playlists with stock music attributed to fake artists. The industry term for these phantom musicians varied—some called them "ghost artists," others preferred "fake artists"—but the concern was universal.
Real musicians were being quietly replaced.
The Problem With Muzak
In December 2017, Pelly published an essay in The Baffler that framed the controversy in broader terms. She titled it "The Problem with Muzak," invoking the name of the company that pioneered background music in elevators and shopping malls throughout the twentieth century.
Her argument was provocative. Spotify's curated playlists, she suggested, weren't really curated in any meaningful sense. They were optimized—engineered to provide what the company called "easy music" and "lean back listening" for an audience of "distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists."
This wasn't music discovery. It was sonic wallpaper. And if listeners only wanted background noise, Spotify's financial incentives pointed in an obvious direction: why pay real artists when cheaper alternatives would do?
The Swedish Investigation
The story went quiet for several years. Spotify weathered other controversies—most notably their $100 million deal with Joe Rogan in 2019—and the fake artists question faded from public attention.
Then Swedish journalists started digging.
In 2022, Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden's largest newspapers, published an investigation that gave the ghost artist phenomenon hard numbers. They identified approximately 20 musicians who had been producing tracks for over 500 fabricated names on Spotify. A production company called Firefly Entertainment was named as a key participant.
The scope was staggering. Dagens Nyheter documented 830 fake artists on the platform. Of those, 495 had been placed on Spotify's own curated playlists. A producer named Johan Röhr alone had contributed over 2,700 songs listed under fictional names.
Another Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, followed with its own investigation. They identified a producer named Christer Sandelin and his record label, Chillmi, as responsible for creating "chill" tracks under fake artist names since 2015. The cumulative streams for Chillmi's music had exceeded 2 billion.
Two billion streams. Music designed to be ignored, credited to people who don't exist.
The Ghosts in the Machine
Pelly traveled to Sweden to meet with the Dagens Nyheter journalists. What she learned there set her on a multi-year investigation that would eventually reveal something far more systematic than anyone had imagined.
She spoke with former Spotify employees. She reviewed internal company records and Slack messages. She interviewed musicians who had participated in the scheme, often without understanding its full scope.
What emerged was a program with an internal name: Perfect Fit Content, or PFC.
PFC wasn't a bug or an organic market phenomenon. It was an elaborate internal initiative where Spotify employees were directly tasked with commissioning music and placing it on curated playlists. The company had created its own parallel music industry, operating in the shadows of the platform it controlled.
Pelly published her findings in Harper's Magazine in December 2024, titling her report "The Ghosts in the Machine." The timing was deliberate—the article served as an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
How Perfect Fit Content Works
The mechanics of PFC reveal a coldly rational business logic.
By 2017, Spotify's curated playlists had become enormously popular. Playlists like "Ambient Chill," "Deep Focus," and "Sleep" were generating billions of streams. But the company had noticed something interesting about how people used these playlists: they weren't really listening. The music was background noise—something to fill silence while working, studying, or falling asleep.
This created what economists might call a market inefficiency. Spotify was paying full royalties for music that listeners weren't fully engaging with. If users were only half-listening, why pay full price?
The solution was Perfect Fit Content. Spotify could commission tracks specifically designed for these background playlists, pay the creators a flat fee rather than per-stream royalties, and pocket the difference. The more PFC tracks populated high-traffic playlists, the more money stayed in Spotify's hands rather than flowing to the broader music industry.
Former employees told Pelly that starting in 2017, playlist editors could monitor special analytics showing "music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins." Those same editors faced pressure to populate curated playlists with PFC tracks.
Not everyone was comfortable with the arrangement.
Some of us really didn't feel good about what was happening... We didn't like that it was these two guys that normally write pop songs replacing swaths of artists across the board. It's just not fair. But it was like trying to stop a train that was already leaving.
Over time, Pelly reported, the skeptics were replaced. By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for Perfect Fit Content. The initiative had grown from an experiment into a core business strategy.
The View From Inside
In 2023, Pelly interviewed a jazz musician who had been creating music for one of Spotify's PFC providers. His account illuminated how the system worked at ground level.
He had no idea about the broader scheme. As far as he knew, he was simply making anonymous tracks for a production company that distributed them on Spotify. The work followed a predictable routine: listen to existing PFC playlists for reference, write charts for new tracks that would fit the established sound, then gather musicians for a recording session. The finished tracks went off to the production company, which handled distribution.
Simple. Professional. Completely disconnected from the end users who would eventually listen.
This compartmentalization appears to be a feature, not a bug. By keeping the working musicians unaware of PFC's scope and purpose, Spotify maintained plausible deniability at multiple levels. The jazz pianist thought he was making generic background music. He had no reason to question whether his work was systematically displacing other artists.
The Provider Network
Pelly's investigation identified the companies supplying Perfect Fit Content. Internal Slack messages showed that "PFC providers" were being actively prioritized for playlist placement. The documented providers included familiar names like Epidemic Sound and Firefly Entertainment, along with others: Hush Hush LLC, Catfarm Music AB, Queenstreet Content AB, and Industria Works.
These weren't traditional record labels competing for listeners' attention. They were content factories, optimized to produce exactly what Spotify's playlists demanded—generic, mood-appropriate music that wouldn't distract users from whatever they were actually trying to do.
When Harper's Magazine contacted Spotify for comment, the company denied plans to scale up PFC. They characterized their tracking of PFC analytics as standard data-gathering, the kind any company would do.
The internal Slack messages told a different story.
The Artificial Intelligence Question
Perfect Fit Content raises uncomfortable questions about what music streaming platforms are actually selling. But an even more disquieting possibility lurks on the horizon: what happens when artificial intelligence enters the equation?
One former Spotify employee told Pelly that AI could eventually be used to augment PFC production. The logic is straightforward. If the goal is to create mood-appropriate background music at the lowest possible cost, why pay human musicians at all? AI can generate infinite variations of "chill" or "focus" music without requiring flat fees, recording sessions, or creative input of any kind.
This isn't hypothetical. AI-generated music is already proliferating on Spotify, raising concerns separate from the PFC controversy.
In August 2024, Ed Newton-Rex, who previously served as vice president of audio at Stability AI (a leading artificial intelligence company), observed that AI-generated tracks were actively being recommended to users. That same month, Futurism investigated a surge of AI-generated cover songs across genres like country music.
The consequences can be bizarre. In September 2024, a 52-year-old man named Michael Smith was charged with wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. His scheme was audacious: he generated countless AI tracks, listed them on Spotify under fake names, then used bot accounts to stream them continuously. The artificial listens generated real royalty payments.
By November, The Verge was documenting what they called "AI slop" spreading across the platform—AI-generated cover songs, AI-generated albums mysteriously appearing on real artists' pages, and tracks traced to a company called Ameritz Music that seemed to exist solely to flood Spotify with machine-generated content.
Spotify's Position
When asked about AI music on their platform, Spotify has maintained a permissive stance. The company does not prohibit artists from using autotune or AI tools, as long as the content doesn't violate other policies against deceptive content or impersonation.
Spotify's CEO, Daniel Ek, has been even more enthusiastic. In 2023, he publicly suggested that AI-generated content could represent a lucrative opportunity for the music business. PFC providers like Epidemic Sound have expressed similar interest in using AI to expand their catalogs.
This creates a feedback loop with troubling implications. If Spotify's curated playlists are already filled with anonymous stock music designed to save on royalty payments, and if AI can produce that same stock music at a fraction of the cost, what happens to the humans who currently compose it?
And if those humans disappear, what's left?
The Broader Context
To understand why any of this matters, you need to understand how streaming royalties work.
When you listen to a song on Spotify, the company doesn't pay the artist directly for that play. Instead, Spotify pools all the subscription and advertising revenue it collects, then divides that pool among rights holders based on their share of total streams. If your music accounts for 0.001% of all Spotify streams in a given month, you receive 0.001% of the royalty pool.
This system, called pro-rata distribution, means that every stream matters—not just to the artist being streamed, but to every artist on the platform. When a fake artist racks up millions of streams on a curated playlist, those are streams that real artists didn't get. The royalty pool stays the same size, but a larger chunk goes to whoever controls the fake artist's music.
In Spotify's case, that means Spotify.
The company has consistently denied that cost savings are the motivation behind Perfect Fit Content. When questioned, Spotify managers have argued that background music is simply what users want. The demand is real, they insist—why shouldn't Spotify meet it?
This defense sidesteps the transparency issue. Users listening to a playlist called "Jazz Vibes" might reasonably assume they're hearing music by actual jazz musicians. They have no way of knowing that some or most of the tracks were created by anonymous producers working for content factories, credited to pseudonyms designed to obscure their corporate origins.
The Aftermath
Pelly's Harper's Magazine article became an overnight sensation. Coverage spread across publications including Consequence of Sound, The Fader, NME, The A.V. Club, and Futurism. Her book, Mood Machine, arrived on January 7, 2025, expanding on the investigation with additional reporting and analysis.
The music industry's response has been muted, at least publicly. Labels and distributors have long depended on Spotify for a significant portion of their streaming revenue, which creates obvious disincentives to criticize the platform too loudly. Individual artists have been more vocal, but their influence over Spotify's business practices remains limited.
Spotify, for its part, continues to deny that Perfect Fit Content represents a strategy to reduce royalty payments. The company points to user demand for background music and insists it has no plans to scale up anonymous tracks at the expense of real musicians.
The internal Slack messages tell a different story. So do the numbers: hundreds of playlists monitored by PFC teams, billions of streams attributed to phantom artists, and a financial structure that rewards Spotify every time a fake musician plays instead of a real one.
What Comes Next
The Perfect Fit Content controversy exposes a fundamental tension in how music streaming platforms operate. These companies present themselves as neutral marketplaces connecting artists with listeners. In reality, they control the discovery mechanisms that determine which music gets heard. When they use that control to favor their own content—especially content designed to be invisible—the marketplace becomes something else entirely.
The addition of artificial intelligence to this equation may accelerate dynamics that are already in motion. If background music can be generated algorithmically at near-zero cost, the economic incentives push toward replacing human musicians wherever possible. The technology that promised to democratize music distribution might instead concentrate it further, with platforms capturing value that once flowed to creators.
For now, the ghosts remain in the machine. Marcus Bloom and his fellow phantoms continue accumulating streams on playlists designed for people who aren't really listening. The royalties flow to companies rather than artists. And Spotify's curated playlists—the ones driving half of all listening on the platform—keep serving up music made by nobody, for nobody in particular.
It's the perfect fit. That's precisely the problem.