News November 9, 2017

Spotify rejects ‘fake artists’ claim but MBW stands by report

Senior Journalist, B2B

Spotify has indignantly denied media allegations that it pays producers to create songs under phony names.

As reported by Music Business Worldwide, the fake artists are reportedly put on premium playlists – e.g. background or mood ones, such asthe popular Peaceful Piano – so it generates money for the Swedish streaming service and reduces the royalties that have to be shared with artists.

Theallegations suggest that the streaming service with 140 million users, by essentially denying “real” artists these incredibly valuablespots on wildly popular playlists, is at the very least acting unethically, andpossiblyacting fraudulently.

The story was first reportedin MBW last August, and was cited last week by Vulture when it made the accusation that two acts Deep Watch and Enno Aare did not exist.

Spotify snapped back a few days later in a missive to Billboard (which ran a piece on the allegations but did not make them): “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.”

However, Music Business Worldwide has stood by its reporting, and its claims it found 50 fake names.

It says they are unknowns but without any presence elsewhere on the internet, They have no Facebook pages or SoundCloud accounts and their music is not on YouTube or Apple Music.

But they still managed to generate a total of 520 million streams which amount to over $3 million in royalty pay-outs.

This is the MBW list, along with total streams:

Aaron Lansing (11.3m)

Advaitas (7.4m)

Allysa Nelson (4.3m)

Amity Cadet (9.2m)

Amy Yeager (5.7m)

Ana Olgica (23.5m)

Antologie (5.8m)

Benny Bernstein (9.6m)

Benny Treskow (14.9m)

Bon Vie (4.7m)