[fallinditch]

My guess is that the music of Johan Röhr was not commissioned as PFC perfect fit content, at least not at first. Rather he just worked out how to game the system with large amounts of bland but competent music under a bunch of aliases... because he made $30 million from royalties in 2022, indicating that he did not have a PFC deal at that time.

It's entirely possible that Johan Röhr's success inspired the concept of PFC. So Spotify, seeing that a lot of people mostly want bland music, made a business decision to reduce their royalty costs.

I think Liz Pelly is doing a good job to highlight how this kinda dumbing down effect is happening, and how the streaming platform model is creating these market distortions. But I'm not sure if this is an evil conspiracy to steal from 'real' artists, or just a rational response to the demand for bland muzak.

As an aside, there's an artist called Relaxing Piano Therapy, which could actually be one of Johan Röhr's aliases, or something he's related to via his Overtone label. Anyway, they have one album before 2019 and 247 albums from 2019 to present (I detect a nice 1 album per week cadence). Some albums are very long, it's a lot of content. One album from 2019 has 50 tracks, each with about 350,000 plays (~17.5 million total). There's another album from 2024 with 0 plays. They have about 5,000 monthly listeners. I guess they used to be in official Spotify playlists, but not any more.