It is likely you’ve listened to many “artists” cheating the Spotify game, it happens all the time. Ever gone down a Spotify rabbit hole and wondered where all the weirdly-named artists like “White Noise Baby Sleep” come from?
Well, they don’t even exist. In fact, Spotify is now filled with search-optimized spammers disguised as “artists” who are simply just cheating the system.
How? It’s actually pretty simple, as Peter Slattery reports for OneZero. They achieve incredibly streaming results by “optimizing their (artist & track) names to show up prominently in Spotify’s search results.”
Take the example of Relaxing Music Therapy, an artist you’ve never heard of but who is amassing up to 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. By utilizing a name that ranks high on Spotify search results for music genres, the “artist” behind the account is able to rank high on searches and playlists, thus racking up high listen counts.
While Spotify is notorious for paying artists a sub-standard and unethical amount to stream their music, if your music ranks high enough for specific searches it will slowly build up enough listens to make the “artist” up to several thousand dollars a month with little to no effort needed.
Don’t believe it? Slattery asks you to check out this selection of Spotify “artistid=”rmm”>s” to get an idea: Pro Sound Effects Library, On Hold Music, Yoga, Jazz Music Therapy for Cats, and Natural White Noise Best Nature Sounds for Sleeping, Stress Relief, Relaxation, Sound Therapy.
With more than a quarter-billion active users at any given time, and growing, to cheat the system all you have to come up with is the perfect phony artist name that users are likely to search for. You may have probably guessed it by the aforementioned names, but what works best to cheat your way to high Spotify plays is using “artist” names inspired by genre adjectives that are commonly searched for to describe and find music.
“Others name themselves after popular uses for certain kinds of music, well-known generic tunes like children’s rhymes, or entire music genres,” writes Slattery. Those creators that are smart enough will then go a step further, titling tracks and albums they upload with further related words, reuploading the same song tens if not hundreds of times in order to guarantee a higher rate of search success. “Relaxing Music Therapy,” he notes, “has uploaded the track “Stream in the Forest With Rain” 616 times to date.”
This is SEO spam at its finest and Slattery notes that these spammers are actually playing right into Spotify’s very own business model and marketing machine. The streaming giant aims to be a “one-stop shop for music for any mood” rather than focusing on the popularity and talent of artists. This is evident if you venture beyond listening to your own established favorite artists, and start digging deeper into Spotify playlists, genre break-downs, and so on.
This isn’t quite news, although it was previously reported differently. In 2017, trade publication Music Business Worldwide revealed that Spotify’s curated playlists filled with