Liz Pelly has written a book called Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, that serves as a documentation on her deep dive investigation on how Spotify is replacing musicians with stock music. This Harper's Magazine excerpt - The Ghosts in the Machine - is a phenomenal overview of the subject. The TLDR is: Spotify created a program called "Perfect Fit Content" in which they partner with production companies to create sound-alike / stock music that gets placed on playlists and receives millions of plays. Because of this, they pay out less to real artists. The TLDR on the TLDR is: Spotify is in a race to the bottom.

Pelly's reporting is fascinating but she also admits it is not entirely new. This Vulture piece from 2017 talks about it and this Music Business Worldwide report from 2016 does as well. It's not that the tactic is being unearthed for the first time, it's that they've built a full-on system for it now.

How did all this happen? Well, this particular bit gives a great overview:

"In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major labels, the rise of Spotify would soon pay off. By the mid-2010s, streaming had cemented itself as the most important source of revenue for the majors, which were raking in cash from Spotify’s millions of paying subscribers after more than a decade of declining revenue. But while Ek’s company was paying labels and publishers a lot of money—some 70 percent of its revenue—it had yet to turn a profit itself, something shareholders would soon demand. In theory, Spotify had any number of options: raising subscription rates, cutting costs by downsizing operations, or finding ways to attract new subscribers."

Cutting costs to increase efficiencies and attempt a return-on-investment for venture capitalists should sound like well trodden territory at this point. Again, it's not new it's just gotten exhaustively better at being bad.

There's lots more to say on this topic but, for now, read the Pelly excerpt, consider ordering the book and give some thought to cancelling your Spotify subscription. I certainly am. *

* and before you think that X streaming service is better and would not participate in such a thing.. go read the article. Spotify is egregious but not alone.