Are music streaming platforms flattening users' tastes?

According to various journalistic investigations, services like Spotify have been encouraging – directly or indirectly – passive and background listening to their playlists for several years, especially those dedicated to genres like jazz or ambient music. The goal seems to be to promote streaming of so-called “atmospheric songs,” which are designed to be enjoyed while engaged in other activities – not surprisingly, they are almost always exclusively instrumental. These tracks are mostly included in playlists specifically generated by the platforms, offered to meet users' specific needs, such as Spotify's collections like “Lo-Fi House” and “Chill Instrumental Beats,” among many others. Recently, Harper’s Magazine published an investigation that seems to confirm many of the suspicions long held about music streaming services, particularly Spotify. The article is an excerpt from a book by the same author – U.S. journalist Liz Pelly – titled Mood Machine – The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, set to be released in the United States in January 2025.

Spotify's strategy, according to Harper’s Magazine, has been for years to influence users' tastes to encourage them to use playlists as background music for their activities. For this reason, the platform has promoted the discovery of such collections primarily based on the imagery and "mood" they evoke, rather than the artists and songs included in them. Spotify has thus been able to populate its playlists with so-called "fake artists," who collaborate with the platform to produce large amounts of tracks for atmospheric playlists, such as the popular “Stress Relief.” This approach allows Spotify to save on royalties owed to real musicians by signing preliminary and more advantageous agreements with selected composers tasked with creating many of the tracks in the platform's most popular collections. At the core of this strategy is a well-defined program called "Perfect Fit Content" (PFC), which aims, among other things, to increase the amount of music available on the platform while reducing the company's costs for covering royalties. According to Harper’s Magazine, by 2023 about 150 Spotify playlists – including popular ones like “Ambient Relaxation,” “Deep Focus,” “Cocktail Jazz,” and “Deep Sleep” – had been populated with many tracks produced with this approach.

How It Came to This

To understand how Spotify came to include tracks by possible fake artists in its playlists, we need to look at the company's origins. Founded in 2008 in Sweden, Spotify was created with the goal of offering nearly unlimited access to a vast music archive through a monthly subscription. Initially, Spotify's CEO and founder, Swedish entrepreneur Daniel Ek, opposed the idea of a platform that suggested songs or playlists – which is why the first version of Spotify placed great emphasis on user choices, highlighting the search bar. Faced with the need to increase profits, the service changed significantly over the years, introducing in 2012 listening suggestions based on mood and activities. Two years later, the company increased investments in technologies used to enhance streaming algorithms to recommend tracks to users based on their listening habits. At that time, the company presented this project as a major opportunity for users and music enthusiasts: the chance to reduce the influence of record labels on their listening choices.

However, since its inception, Spotify has been heavily influenced by some of the major global labels: for instance, Sony, Universal, and Warner already owned 17% of the company at the time of its market launch. Record labels had significant bargaining power with the company and profited greatly from its success. For many years, Spotify never generated profits, having to allocate about 70% of its earnings to labels and publishers. For this reason, the company has repeatedly been forced to raise subscription prices. However, starting in 2016 – as reported by numerous journalistic investigations – Spotify began attempting to exert greater influence on its subscribers' tastes to steer them toward predefined playlists, theoretically populated by various fake artists, thereby saving on royalties. The result, however, has been to encourage passive and unengaged listening, flattening the tastes of many users. Harper’s Magazine reported speaking with a musician who creates atmospheric tracks distributed in some Spotify playlists, who consistently receives the same advice for these contributions: they must "sound" as easy as possible.