Liz Pelly, the journalist who uncovered Spotify's 'fake artist' farms: "In an hour, they produce dozens of songs."

Liz Pelly (Nassau, New York, 35) had been writing about music for various blogs and media outlets since her teens until she grew tired of promotional interviews and writing listicle articles summarizing entire albums in five lines. As a true millennial, she knew that little remained of the utopian internet that democratized music consumption, making it more accessible until piracy became a global problem. The arrival of streaming platforms changed everything, and in 2016, this editor decided to begin investigating Spotify and its corporate consolidation mechanisms through its playlists.

After nearly a decade of work, the adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) has published Mood Machine (Simon & Schuster) , an investigation with more than 100 sources in which she not only uncovers the platform's extractivist policies but also paints a picture of consumer control that has flattened musical taste. We met with her at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) shortly before her talk with journalist Shawn Reynaldo about the costs of the perfect playlist, as part of the Primavera Pro program.

Question: One of the playlists Spotify recommends is titled "Pilates Posh Princess." What is the platform trying to tell me?

Answer: Streaming services now categorize music by appealing to emotions, by making you feel like the protagonist. They do so based on vibes and feelings. When they recommend that playlist to you in the main carousel, it's to make you think: "Oh yeah, my life is a movie, and today I want to be a 'Pilates Posh Princess.'"

Q. Isn't it a bit essentialist to fit me into that group? Is there a Spotify for boys and a Spotify for girls ?

A. Streaming has inherited the techniques of personalized marketing. And like the rest of the music industry, it often assumes that people don't like music or underestimates users' ability to engage and be curious. If you truly believed your users were serious about music or were fans, you would contextualize them in terms that truly relate to it. Instead of feelings, you could explain music based on musical attributes, record labels, regional scenes, or other aspects that truly help us learn about music culture.

Q. Are predetermined lists making us dumb?

A. When you think about what a playlist is—a way of grouping songs—there are ways of doing it that do relate to music. But streaming services try to package songs in ways they hope will appeal to a sense of uniqueness or specialness, or simply what users will click on.

Q. In your book, you point out that Spotify seemed like the platform that would save artists from piracy, but that hasn't been the case.

A. Spotify created a huge opportunity against piracy and was instrumental in returning the global music business to profitability. Streaming services pass on 70% of their revenue to rights holders. But because of the pro rata business model, most of that revenue ends up in the hands of the major record labels. We learned that saving the music industry wasn't the same as saving musicians.

Q. Who makes money from Spotify?

A. The model is designed to benefit artists who operate on a large scale, who aspire to be popular artists, and who have a strong marketing backing. On Spotify, what makes money is either those who aspire to massive success or those who create music that gets repeated streams—that is, works well in the background.

Q. What we wear to do other things.

A: Yes, there's this rise of what the industry calls functional music. Music you listen to in the background while you work, study, or try to sleep. But for artists who make music that's less commercial or less ideal for those kinds of constant-play situations, the model doesn't really work. That doesn't mean those songs don't have value, that those artists don't have value.

Q. Indie artists have lost out to functional music.

A. The paradox of this is that independent music fans are more willing to pay for it than passive listeners or pop fans. The question here is: Did streaming incentivize certain types of fans to stop paying for music, when in reality those fans would be willing to continue paying musicians directly?

Q. In your research, you discovered the presence of “fake artists” on Spotify. Who are they?

A. When I publishedmy first article on Spotify in 2017 , I was contacted by several people who had worked in the industry alerting me to the same rumor: the existence of fake artists that the platform was putting on its playlists, particularly those about studying, sleeping, and concentrating. I started by investigating journalists from the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter , who had access to copyright documents to show that there were a handful of composers who, under pseudonyms, were responsible for thousands of artist names and thousands of songs on these main playlists. I went to Sweden, met with those journalists, and continued investigating, interviewing dozens of sources.

Q. What did you discover?

A. Spotify has an internal team specifically responsible for these instrumental playlists, working with a dedicated group of licensing experts to provide this material. They internally use the term "fit- to- content." I also contacted the musicians who had been hired to create this content. They're session musicians or instrumental artists hired en masse to produce music in large quantities. These artists are often given pseudonyms that don't correspond to actual artists so you can't find information about them online.

There are a handful of composers who, under pseudonyms, are responsible for thousands of artist names and thousands of songs on these playlists.

Q. How do they work?

A. It all depends on the company. There are several companies, and each one works differently. Some musicians told me they produce a dozen songs in an hour and that they try to make as many songs as possible in the shortest amount of time.

Q. Another content farm.

A: Yes, it reminds me of those journalists who are hired to produce 15 articles a day. It's all very much a clickbait culture.

Q. How is this tyranny of the click affecting artists?

A. I think any creative person—be they a musician, writer, or filmmaker—feels the pressure of industries that increasingly value those metrics. If you're a musician, not only does the number of plays determine how much you get paid, but it increasingly influences whether you're scheduled for a festival or booked for your work. The same goes for friends who make videos: they need a certain number of plays for their work to be seen as successful. No one starts out in music, journalism, or video because they want people to post emojis on Instagram reels of their work. It's a chore to also have to be a full-time social media manager and marketer . Many musicians see themselves that way. And journalism faces similar pressures with the rise of platforms like Substack and newsletters, which are part of the digital economy, subjecting writers to those same metrics and isolating their journalistic work.