Spotify is the most popular music streaming service available and has been for quite some time. Millions of people enjoy the app, and one of its most popular features is the “Perfect Fit Content” or PFC.
Spotify creates playlists that are designed to fit perfectly into any mood. If you are looking to relax, they have a playlist for that. If you’re looking to get motivated to work out, they have something for you as well. The list of options is nearly endless.
This is a great tool that many people enjoy, and on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it.
Author Liz Pelly consulted with former employees of the company, however, and she wrote about the fact that Spotify doesn’t just look for songs that perfectly fit the mood a list is trying to promote, but they look for songs where they don’t have to pay the artist much, if anything, for its use.
Pelly wrote about this in “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist” published in Harper’s where she said:
“They are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.”
One ex-Spotify employee, for example, said:
“Initially, they would give us links to stuff, like, ‘Oh, it’s no pressure for you to add it, but if you can, that would be great. Then it became more aggressive, like, ‘Oh, this is the style of music in your playlist, if you try it and it works, then why not?'”
The company kept pressuring its playlist managers to include more and more music that the company could use without paying much at all.
One way that they did this was to hire musicians to come in and record a specific type of track that they knew would fit in well to these playlists. They would pay them a set amount for full ownership rights to the track, so the musician was entitled to nothing beyond their one-time payment.
This allowed them to pay a few hundred dollars for a song that they knew they would stream millions of times.
Spotify already has a reputation for paying artists very little when streaming their work, but this report raises new ethical concerns about how it is maximizing profit at the expense of artists.
Spotify is all about making money at any cost.
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