Buying places on Spotify playlists is the new payola, insiders say
Musicians and music labels are paying big money to add their tracks to influential Spotify playlists, music industry insiders have claimed.
The black market has been called a 21st-century ‘‘payola’’, after the prohibited practice of labels paying for radio airtime.
One record industry boss in London said he was aware of ‘‘playlist pluggers’’ offering to promote tracks to influential playlists for fees of £2000 or £3000 (NZ$3860 or $5800).
He said that merely publicising tracks to playlist owners was legitimate, but added: ‘‘There are a lot of grey areas. Your money might not go directly to the playlist owner, but these pluggers know the right people, can call in favours, take them for dinner or drinks.’’
He said individuals could not buy placement on Spotify’s own playlists, which are the most streamed, but that when it came to independent playlists, it was a ‘‘free-for-all’’ in which £200 (NZ$386) could change hands in a pub and no-one would ever find out.
A number of online companies also charge musicians or labels small sums to ‘‘pitch’’ tracks to playlists. One site, Playlister, altered its business model to ‘‘unequivocally confirm we are not a site that compensates playlisters for placements’’, after a recent report on The Daily Dot website said that users could pay US$5 to US$2000 (NZ$6.90 to $2770) to be added to playlists.
Spotify has subsequently withdrawn the company’s access to its data, causing the service to shut down.
There is evidence that paying for access to playlists, if not full-on placement, can be cost-effective.
Atlanta rapper Tommie King said his single Eastside had clocked up more than 110,000 streams owing to its placement on 14 playlists after his manager paid curators to check it out. ‘‘Streams are now the only way to really reach people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect with. It gives you the ability to be played worldwide,’’ he told The Daily Dot.
Although industry insiders deny that placement on Spotify’s inhouse playlists can be bought directly, they say that getting a track on to enough private lists will get it added to Spotify’s own Release Radar and Discover Weekly lists, which are generated by algorithms, bringing musicians wide exposure.
Nevertheless, experts said that paying for placements on playlists would rarely do enough to ‘‘make’’ a track, and most musicians trying to game the system would be disappointed.
Spotify is the largest streaming service, with about 159 million active users and 71 million paid subscribers.
In 2015, Billboard magazine quoted a music label executive who claimed that slots on popular playlists were being sold for between US$2000 and US$10,000. Spotify updated its terms to prohibit ‘‘selling a user account or playlist, or otherwise accepting any compensation, financial or otherwise, to influence the name of an account or playlist or the content included on an account or playlist’’.
Experts say that this is impossible for Spotify to police.
It is also not the only way that the platform has been abused. Scammers recently made hundreds of thousands of pounds from Spotify by setting up a network of accounts to listen to music that they owned on a loop.