‘Spotify was caught (very publicly) paying production companies to make ambient and cafe jazz tracks under fake artist names so they could pay fewer royalties to real artists.’
Spotify is an anti-music leech. As if their minuscule streaming payouts weren’t bad enough, now this?
‘ Roughly twenty songwriters were operating behind more than five hundred fake artist names. One production company, Firefly Entertainment, was linked to 830 fake artists — at least 495 of which had music sitting on Spotify’s own first-party playlists — while Firefly’s revenue grew tenfold in three years.
The connection between Firefly and Spotify, as Dagens Nyheter and Liz Pelly documented, ran through a lifelong personal friendship between Firefly's founder Fredrik Hult and Nick Holmstén — the man who served as Spotify's global head of music, with ultimate responsibility for playlisting strategy. Two guys from the same small Swedish town. Family vacations together, dinners out, visits to the Spotify office, all lovingly documented on Instagram, including a photo of Hult posing with Firefly producers at Spotify’s 2018 Grammy party.
Dagens Nyheter’s analysis found that Firefly’s tracks land on flagship editorial playlists within one hour of upload—an advantage real artists wait a week or more for, having pitched through standard channels. This speed provides a massive algorithmic head-start — and because Spotify pays from a shared pro-rata pool, every stream these ghost tracks vacuum up is money that would have otherwise gone to legitimate, working musicians.’
xvxvx•27m ago
Spotify is an anti-music leech. As if their minuscule streaming payouts weren’t bad enough, now this?
‘ Roughly twenty songwriters were operating behind more than five hundred fake artist names. One production company, Firefly Entertainment, was linked to 830 fake artists — at least 495 of which had music sitting on Spotify’s own first-party playlists — while Firefly’s revenue grew tenfold in three years.
The connection between Firefly and Spotify, as Dagens Nyheter and Liz Pelly documented, ran through a lifelong personal friendship between Firefly's founder Fredrik Hult and Nick Holmstén — the man who served as Spotify's global head of music, with ultimate responsibility for playlisting strategy. Two guys from the same small Swedish town. Family vacations together, dinners out, visits to the Spotify office, all lovingly documented on Instagram, including a photo of Hult posing with Firefly producers at Spotify’s 2018 Grammy party.
Dagens Nyheter’s analysis found that Firefly’s tracks land on flagship editorial playlists within one hour of upload—an advantage real artists wait a week or more for, having pitched through standard channels. This speed provides a massive algorithmic head-start — and because Spotify pays from a shared pro-rata pool, every stream these ghost tracks vacuum up is money that would have otherwise gone to legitimate, working musicians.’
https://joelgouveia.substack.com/p/escaping-the-devil-you-kn...