[1] In December of 2024, the specific initiative of Perfect Fit Content (PFC) was revealed in a report by Liz Pelly, a music writer and critic whose internal investigation regarding the matter, titled "The Ghosts in the Machine", was published in Harper's Magazine.
[4] With regard to PFC, they have cited user demand for background music and have denied their intention to scale up anonymously created tracks to supplant real musicians.
[5] On August 31, 2016, Music Business Worldwide reported that Spotify, headed by Daniel Ek, was paying musicians "a flat fee" for tracks of various genres—such as "jazz, chill and peaceful piano playing"—to be listed under fabricated names.
Although the publication was unable to report precisely which artists on the music platform were fake due to a disclosure agreement with "Multiple cast-iron sources", they revealed that they knew about "five Spotify-owned tracks that each have more than 500,000 streams—and one with over a million."
At the time, the practice was seen as an "experiment, rather than a large-scale disruption of the platform's catalogues", but the publication raised concerns about "what effect a larger-scale version of this strategy may have on Spotify’s overall payment to recorded rights-holders—and where on its playlist map the trend might go next.
To double down on their original allegations from 2016, the publication stated that they had contacted a musician in Europe who made a deal with the music platform to create tracks for fabricated artists which "were then included by Spotify on key genre-based playlists."
Furthermore, they corroborated the "fake artists" allegations with other "senior sources in the industry" who showed no surprise and stated that the phenomenon "was now common practice, and was indeed a bid by the platform to drive down its licensing costs"; other sources pointed out that several cover song playlists were populated by productions from cheap companies and that plenty of such third parties have been involved much to the chagrin of actual music labels.
During the summer, an "owner of an independent record label in New York" contacted her with a rumor that Spotify was populating its most-viewed playlists with "stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists".
[2] On December 4, 2017, Pelly published an essay in The Baffler titled "The Problem with Muzak" which posed the question: "How can artists distribute and sell their work in a digital economy beholden to ruthlessly commercial and centralized interests?"
She then went on to discuss how Spotify's "curated" playlists were more so created for the sake of providing "easy music" and "lean back listening" "to an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists"; as a result, Pelly argued, actual musicians and labels were getting substituted by trend-driven, maximally profitable tracks.
From then on, she "spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians" and discovered an "elaborate internal program" called Perfect Fit Content (PFC) where Spotify employees were directly tasked with taking commissioned music and listing it on their curated playlists.
[2] Pelly's report on PFC, titled "The Ghosts in the Machine" and published in Harper's Magazine, became an overnight sensation, spurring online discourse and receiving coverage from countless publications including Consequence of Sound, The Fader, NME, The A.V.
[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] The article was an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, which was released on January 7, 2025 by Astra House.
In August of 2024, Ed Newton-Rex, the former vice president of audio at Stability AI, stated that "There are multiple reports of [AI-generated music] being recommended to people".