@murraystassen: THIS ‘SECRET’ COMPOSER IS BEHIND 650 FAKE ARTISTS ON SPOTIFY. HIS MUSIC HAS BEEN STREAMED 15BN TIMES ON THE PLATFORM (REPORT)

Citing its own “unique data analysis”, DN reports that Johan Röhr has songs on “at least” 144 official Spotify playlists under various artist pseudonyms and that in eleven of those playlists, “more than a fifth” of the entirety of those lists are made up of his songs.

Read the post on Music Business Worldwide

[Editor Charlie sez: Surely this doesn’t mean that someone in the music business is trying to juice the charts?]

@musictechpolicy: A willing buyer willing seller joke

@wordsbykristin: How Does Spotify’s New Royalties Model Affect Songwriters? In Short, It Doesn’t

[Excellent explainer by Kristin Robinson]


Even if Spotify’s new royalty model won’t pay artists’ whose tracks don’t hit 1,000 streams in a year, songwriters will still earn money from those plays — for now, at least.

As Billboard reported last month, Spotify is planning to implement three changes to its royalty model early next year that would affect the lowest-streaming acts, non-music noise tracks and distributors and labels committing fraud. Under this new scheme, more than two-thirds of the tracks uploaded to that platform will not be eligible to receive royalties — but that change, notably, will only impact about 0.5% of the royalty pool. 

Nevertheless, this has sparked debate around the music community, with some questioning the ethics of not paying artists for whatever streams they garnered simply because they were not popular enough. 

Read the post on Billboard