If you wanted more free speech and less PC you would probably not go to a company with its HQ in Sweden.
Sweden's biggest forum has its servers in USA, to get around some of Sweden's restrictions when it comes to online opinions.
Yup.
Or if you were all about "content creators and standing up for the little guy", you wouldn't go to a giant company that literally makes a bunch of fake artists up and fake stream data, because artist payouts are a done based on % of worldwide streaming, thus fake artists give Spotify a way to cut down the payout to real artists.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/fe...w-playing-the-service-at-its-own-game-834746/
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The hypothesis, later confirmed, was that many of these artists were, in fact, “fake” (i.e. pseudonymous) names attributed to tracks created by composers signed to
Epidemic Sound, a Swedish “production music” house. The unproven inkling amongst major music labels was, and remains, that Spotify pays a lower royalty rate for these songs than it does for tracks from “real artists” vying for the same playlist spots.
Why? Because Spotify pays out royalties on a
pro rata basis. This means – as
explained on Rolling Stone previously – that the firm divides its total industry payout across the entirety of artists on its platform, based on their portion of overall streams. The important bit: if “fake artists” are paid lower contractual royalty rates than “real” acts, and then, driven by playlist inclusion, claim a certain percentage of Spotify’s total monthly streams, Spotify ends up keeping more money. An ex-Spotify insider was once
quoted by Variety as suggesting that this was a deliberate company strategy: “It’s one of a number of internal initiatives to lower the royalties [Spotify is] paying to the major labels,” they said.
In the nearly two years since that initial report, those same 50 “fake artists” have done rather well, racking up 2.85 billion Spotify streams between them to date. Indeed, the ten names listed below have cumulatively attracted more than a billion Spotify plays (1.22 billion) alone:
- ‘Ana Olgica’ – 154 million plays, 1.52 million monthly listeners;
- ‘Charles Bolt’ – 143 million plays, 1.85 million monthly listeners;
- ‘Samuel Lindon’ – 145 million plays, 1.55 million monthly listeners;
- ‘Aaron Lansing’ – 121 million plays, 1.62 million monthly listeners;
- ‘Enno Aare’ – 120 million plays; 1.15 million monthly listeners;
- ‘Piotr Miteska’ – 115 million plays; 1.47 million monthly listeners;
- ‘They Dream By Day’ – 108 million plays; 1.24 million monthly listeners
- ‘Lo Mimieux’ – 107 million plays, 1.28 million monthly listeners;
- ‘Karin Borg’ – 104 million plays, 987,000 monthly listeners;
- ‘Jozef Gatysik’ – 98.8 million plays, 966,000 monthly listeners;
These numbers actually downplay the real total, having been obtained from Spotify’s public-facing artist information, which only displays streaming data for up to 10 tracks per act. (Most of the above artists have six or fewer tracks available on Spotify.) Don’t forget, it’s possible that all of the music attributed to the names above is, behind the scenes, actually written and/or performed by the same person. To put the enormity of “fake artist” popularity into context, acts whose entire catalogs have fewer chart-eligible Spotify streams than 1.22 billion include:
Beyoncé, John Legend, One Direction, Childish Gambino, Lorde and Meek Mill."