Okay, what is it with Swedes min-maxing their way to the top of pop music? How do they do it? Even Pewdiepie is like another case of chasing algorithmic success.
In this case it's not pop music, it's instrumental ambient music and childrens tunes.. Very particular set of playlists, Spotify-owned, that if you get into them you're essentially guaranteed millions of streams (as those playlists have tens of millions of followers that I'm sure just have them on repeat often - guilty here as well..)
Aside from the sketchy issue with faking 750 artist names, apparently the music is good and has good artistic intent within the genre.
According to the article, you can do deals where you trade away part of your royalty for a higher placement on those Spotify-owned playlists, which in his case seems to be the right business choice to make by far.
Why would this be problematic? Artist commonly work under one or more pseudonyms. 750 is quite a lot for sure, but is there material difference between that and just a few?
Hm actually I remember I read in the studio's reply to this, that there weren't 750 active artist names at the same time, this was over many years and they release under some names, then let it go and do 50 new names etc. Still.. it's some kind of diversion of the consumer's expectations. It's one thing to see a pseudonym, but in this case, it was under "normal sounding" names.
Also, the composers' names were faked as well, so there were 750 artist names and 50 composer names..
We used to have Kommunala Musikskolan, where kids for a relatively low fee could learn to play music. In the year 2000 it had 335 000 pupils (at the time the population of Sweden was less than 9 million people).
It's a pretty well known secret that a large part of why there is a Swedish cottage music industry is the historical ease of welfare fraud, on top of the already generous grants for cultural activities. You could basically get the government to not only pay for your rent, but your studio and equipment as well. Generations of Swedish musicians were living off unemployment checks while getting started. That era has drawn to a close, but there's still significant momentum left in the music industry it spawned.
Aside from the sketchy issue with faking 750 artist names, apparently the music is good and has good artistic intent within the genre.
According to the article, you can do deals where you trade away part of your royalty for a higher placement on those Spotify-owned playlists, which in his case seems to be the right business choice to make by far.