Spotify has denied creating ‘fake artists’ to pay less in royalties

A Spotify spokesperson has come forward to deny claims, originally made by Music Business Worldwide that they’d created over 50 fake artists for their playlists.

The report was skeptical of the fact that artists featuring on playlists such as “Sleep” and “Ambient Chill” had received millions of plays on the site yet didn’t seem to exist online elsewhere.

‘Relejar’ is one of the artists, who seem to have received 13.4 million streams on Spotify however fails to appear in search results elsewhere.

“We do not and have never created ‘fake’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists. Categorically untrue, full stop,” said a spokesperson for the streaming platform. “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 rights-holders and we pay them – we don’t pay ourselves.”

Mark Mulligan, from Midia research has recently told BBC that Spotify could be “commissioning others to produce content which it then pays lower royalties for in return”, adding that it may also be possible that the company could be buying existing production music from other companies.

This comes shortly after Spotify announced the purchase of an online music production platform which would enable artists to upload their work immediately to the streaming service.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.