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For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

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Eventually, it became clear internally that many of the playlist editors—whom Spotify had touted in the press as music lovers with encyclopedic knowledge—were uninterested in participating in the scheme. The company started to bring on editors who seemed less bothered by the PFC model. These new editors looked after mood and activity playlists, and worked on playlists and programs that other editors didn’t want to take part in anymore. (Spotify denies that staffers were encouraged to add PFC to playlists, and that playlist editors were discontented with the program.) By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. Over 150 of these, including “Ambient Relaxation,” “Deep Focus,” “100% Lounge,” “Bossa Nova Dinner,” “Cocktail Jazz,” “Deep Sleep,” “Morning Stretch,” and “Detox,” were nearly entirely made up of PFC.

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The jazz musician asked me not to identify the name of the company he worked for; he didn’t want to risk losing the gig. Throughout our conversation, though, he repeatedly emphasized his reservations about the system, calling it “shameful”—even without knowledge of the hard details of the program, he understood that his work was creating value for a company, and a system, with little regard for the well-being of independent artists. In general, the musicians working with PFC companies I spoke with were highly critical of the arrangement. One musician who made electronic compositions for Epidemic Sound told me about how “the creative process was more about replicating playlist styles and vibes than looking inward.” Another musician, a professional audio engineer who turned out ambient recordings for a different PFC partner, told me that he stopped making this type of stock music because “it felt unethical, like some kind of money-laundering scheme.”

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A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

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