Liz Pelly, writing for Harper’s Magazine, details how Spotify has quietly been swapping music by well-known artists from its playlists with tracks it commissioned from unknown artists:
Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content. […]
Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC).
Replacing real music with tracks they own and have produced allows them to spend less in royalties.
This should really surprise no one. Spotify has been open about its desire to always be there, in the background. Their own internal research shows most of their users just want background noise, and don’t care about what’s being played. They have at no point shown much regard for music itself — they promote what works for advertising, itself the sole reason why they got into podcasting. I’m not sure Rachmaninoff can be of any use to them.