De ambient music, everywhere, produced in industrial quantities to manage to slip into the greatest number of playlists. This is how the Swedish label Firefly Entertainment achieves a good part of its impressive turnover. According to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the label generates 6.2 million euros in revenue per year, ten times more than just three years ago, mainly by a considerable number of fake artists on Spotify.
As the specialized site Music Business Worldwide explains, these artists have no visible digital footprint other than in certain playlists, very listened to, created by Spotify. This generally concerns soothing music, “chill”, intended to accompany moments of work, mediation or concentration, a genre that we like to listen to for a long time without paying attention to the title or the artist behind it.
20 composers behind 500 fake artists
Thus, the music world is wondering about the links between this type of label and the platform: has Spotify made an agreement to promote these obscure practices in its playlists which accumulate billions of plays, to the detriment of artists signed to major record labels? Some suspect a massive promotion of tracks created by fake Firefly Entertainment artists in Spotify playlists in exchange for reduced royalty payments compared to other artists.
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The Swedish newspaper has identified a list of 830 fake artists linked to the same label, more than half of which are prominently in Spotify playlists. By the investigators’ own admission, these figures are far from reflecting reality: a hundred playlists were reviewed among the thousands made by the platform. Even more surprising, it appears that around twenty composers are hiding behind 500 different artists referenced on the platform. One of them even records 7.7 million monthly plays under 62 different artist names. All based in Sweden, the leaders of Spotify and Firefly Entertainment have never hidden their closeness.