US-based journalist Liz Pelly has been one of Spotify’s key critics in the media, and her new book ‘Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist’ will be making uneasy reading for the company when it is released in January.
Ahead of that, Harpers has published a long extract from the book focusing on Spotify’s ‘Perfect Fit Content’ – PFC for short. This is described as a program that seeds tracks created by production-music companies in mood-focused playlists.
Pelly draws on interviews with former employees, internal records and Slack messages to set out the details of how the program worked and how it grew.
“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,” is her verdict.
“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.”
