Ghost artists on Spotify

Another thing that happens with Spotify playlist is that someone will post something like:

"epic hip hop bangers"

Song 1-13 will indeed be epic hip hop bangers. Then song 14 is some random guy's track, which picks up the playlist momentum from its neighbors. Song 15-23 is epic bangers, then song 24. and on and on. The person who made the playlist is, of course, random guy or one of their friends.

That's why I typically only listen either to whole albums on spotify, or DJ sets on soundcloud or youtube. There are too many individual human beings out there with great taste to bother with the algorithmic stuff.

I don't know if it's still common but I used to run into this with album playlists on Youtube: all the tracks from something famous and then the creator's tracks tacked on the end.

Honestly I can't hate random guy, that's a pretty clever tactic. If he's good it'll take off and he deserves it.

> Song 1-13 will indeed be epic hip hop bangers. Then song 14 is some random guy's track, which picks up the playlist momentum from its neighbors. Song 15-23 is epic bangers, then song 24. and on and on. The person who made the playlist is, of course, random guy or one of their friends.

Not sure if I understand your argument. Is it the following: "epic hip hop bangers 1-13 and 15-23" are the boring millionth replay of all the genre-defining tracks of the past 40 years, and only tracks 14 and 24 are the precious new finds? If that is the argument, I totally agree.

I mean that's not unusual either I suppose, it's a self promo strategy. Spotify does it themselves as well, mixing in relatively unknown artists into generated playlists to give them a bit more exposure which they would never get if "existing popularity" was the metric to include them in generated playlists. The article implies that artists can accept lower royalty payments to get more exposure like that too, so it's intentional by Spotify and the artists themselves. I mean personally I don't care for it, but good for them.

What I really don't like is the spam where they add a random well-known artist's name to their song to make it look like it's a collaboration, but it's either a low effort cover or has absolutely nothing to do with it. At least I've stopped gettring random basement mumble rap in generated metal playlists.

Those could also be payed placements.

Are you seeing that on individual playlists created by users or official Spotify playlists? I’ve only seen the former so far trying to get their band exposure, etc by making a playlist popular.

The way I understand it is that the 14th song is not a banger, but a song put between well known, good songs, to boost its number of streams.

I’ve noticed it a few times, I was listening to something like “best of 80s” and a few tracks were from the same band that I couldn’t find any info about. So my guess was that the creator of the list put some of the songs they (or their friends) made, then those songs got millions of streams just because they were on that playlist even though they had nothing to do with the expected content. It’s either for the money or maybe PR to make an impression that the band is popular

Still beats radio. That was all payed placements. With commercials. And obnoxious DJs.

I think something like that would be easily detected and penalized. Might explain why you don't see it any more

This is a technique that every music marketing outfit will recommend nowadays. It’s one of the most effective ways to promote new music, but it requires the effort to create and maintain playlists.