What’s really going on with Spotify’s fake artist controversy

A few thoughts: 1. I definitely wish there was a way to filter out "covers" from Spotify. There are definitely a handful of times that Spotify puts covered versions of songs in their "Discover" playlist. 2. If these songs are "fake" in that Spotify is commissioning artists to create original songs and then featuring those songs in Spotify-created playlists, is this any different than Netflix/Hulu/Amazon original content?

If I'm an enterprising bedroom producer (which I once was), I'd jump on this opportunity and go to Spotify with my music. Ten aliases, undercut the other filler artists, A/B test their performance, and see if I could use this dynamic to launch my own career.

In fact, with how valuable this could be to true indies, I'm surprised Spotify isn't soliciting this stronger.

> After going through MBW’s list of 50 artists, The Verge has learned that most of the artists on the list are pseudonyms for real musicians.

Well, duh. What else could it be? Unless Spotify has been secretly investing a lot of money into cutting-edge machine creativity research a la Google's "Magenta" project, then of course these tracks are coming from "real musicians".

I'm not sure if there's any controversy here. Fake news, fake artists, fake economy, fake everything. When does it stop?