[l33tman]

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.

[fsloth]

" faking 750 artist names"

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?

[kandel]

One could say he is dominating an opportunity reserved for small-time artists by deceit.

[dawgbrolamo]

smurfing the music world, epic

[hoffs]

Because it floods any related recommendations with same artist ultimately

[fsloth]

I thought the intent was to maximize diversification, not to saturate a single channel? Not sure what actually takes place and I may be mistaken.

[l33tman]

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..

[j45]

Pen names aren't sketchy.

If it's focusing on SEO, they could be spreading their platform risk to not be across one or a few accounts.

Although if people feel pop music is authentic they might feel betrayed