Spotify hires musicians to churn out content that fits certain criteria.
see https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
No one actually understands what's written in this article, including the authors themselves.
Also note how you didn't provide a single track that Spotify allegedly pays no royalties for.
Literally in the very article everyone links to but is incapable of reading there's even this text:
--- start quote ---
Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty.
--- end quote ---
The allegation is that Spotify pays out to entities which are ultimately owned by themselves, or that they get kickbacks in other ways like ad purchases (probably illegal, but hard to prove if you're at all clever about it).
I remember I found a track a few years ago, by the artist Mayhem. No, not the metal band. The background music artist Mayhem. Which only ever released two tracks. One of which, "Solitude Hymns", happened to get featured in one of Spotify's playlists, and managed to rack up more plays than any track by the more famous metal band at the time.
They haven't scrubbed it. Just look it up.
It's not really unsourced. It's just very rarely talked about. I think you may get an article once every 10 years questioning the actual rights holders and distributors.
I mean, you get people in these discussions on HN that don't even know that Spotify (and other streaming services) don't even have direct contracts with artists and everything is going through intermediaries.
> I remember I found a track a few years ago, by the artist Mayhem. No, not the metal band. The background music artist Mayhem. Which only ever released two tracks. One of which, "Solitude Hymns", happened to get featured in one of Spotify's playlists, and managed to rack up more plays than any track by the more famous metal band at the time.
Thank you! You're the only one who could point out a weird track.
41K monthly listeners for the band. The track got 20 million plays because it was featured.
That's where the gray zone begins: was this band with two songs picked because it is cheaper to include (for whatever reason) or was it just lucky (like some other bands that got big through streaming like Glass Animals).
What is hard though, is finding out which aggregator/intermediary/record company collected the payments for mayfly Mayhem's plays. I have not succeeded at that, if you find a way to get that information out of Spotify, do tell me. It's probably actually easier to find out who made the music. MBW managed to find out that at least some of these tracks were made by well-connected Swedish producers, as I recall.