This article in Harper’s Magazine about the phenomena of “ghost artists” capturing real attention (and taking real money) from already-underpaid artists is both fascinating and disheartening.

The general idea of ghost artists is both depressing and fairly simple to understand:

Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.

This leads to something that Spotify (apparently) call the “Perfect Fit Content” program:

Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.

To their credit (and it pains me to use that word), Spotify does (did?) employ actual musicians to make these “sound-alike” tracks. Although they were only payed a flat fee (no royalties) and the working conditions are designed to make the most generic music imaginable.

A typical session starts with a production company sending along links to target playlists as reference points. His task is to then chart out new songs that could stream well on these playlists. “Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.”…[The session musician] wasn’t a scam artist with a master plan to steal prime playlist real estate. He was just someone who, like other working musicians today, was trying to cobble together a living. “There are so many things in music that you treat as grunt work,” he said. “This kind of felt like the same category as wedding gigs or corporate gigs. It’s made very explicit on Spotify that these are background playlists, so it didn’t necessarily strike me as any different from that. . . . You’re just a piece of the furniture.”

It’s true that music streaming is, in many ways, such a great technology. I very distinctly remember switching radio station to find one playing music (and not DJ shenanigans) in the morning on the way to high school, picking out a few CDs for a long car trip, or making my own mix CDs.

But the ubiquity of streaming music has also led to the devaluing of music (and musicians) on the whole, and it seems like the auto-generated playlists are only designed to encourage listeners to listen to more music. No thought of going deeper on an artist, or diving into the history of a genre or a specific musical style, scene, or movement, just more is better.

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

It’s not a cheerful read, necessarily, but I think it’s an important one for a musician or anyone who cares about the future of the music business.

Read the full article on Harper’s Magazine.