who made this?

spotify's calm playlists are full of names nobody has heard of. i followed one question, who made this music, to a composer with 656 names and a band made with ai.

on 23 february 2017, spotify's ambient chill playlist changed. 16 tracks by brian eno, bibio, jon hopkins and other well-known electronic artists went out, and 28 songs linked to epidemic sound came in. the music writer david turner spotted it in the playlist data. one of the new names in eno's place was silver maple.

silver maple isn't a band. epidemic sound is a company in stockholm that sells background music. a while later, 34 of the playlist's 52 tracks were theirs.

that same year, spotify showed its playlist editors a new idea, called perfect fit content. inside the company it was described as music commissioned to fit a playlist or a mood, "with improved margins". by 2023, more than 150 of its playlists were almost all this music: deep focus, cocktail jazz, bossa nova dinner, deep sleep and more. a team of ten, called strategic programming, handled it.

spotify's own help page says background and production music has paid lower royalties than other music for decades, and that this can be the case on spotify too.

the journalist liz pelly reported all of this in harper's magazine in january 2025, and in her book mood machine. one of her sources described the attitude inside: if the user doesn't notice, it's fine. asked why it tracked this music across hundreds of playlists, spotify told her it is "data driven in all that we do". it also says no deal promises anyone a place on a playlist, and that listening to this music has stayed low for ten years.

so who makes it? a lot of the time, real musicians, often for a flat fee and fast. a jazz player in new york told pelly his trio recorded about fifteen tracks in an hour or two, one take each. a composer who worked for epidemic said he was usually paid about $1,700, and the company bought the tracks outright. pelly calls them ghost artists, because there are real people behind the names.

and sometimes it's one man with a lot of names. in march 2024 the swedish newspaper dagens nyheter named johan röhr, a composer from the stockholm area. maya åström, minik knudsen, mingmei hsueh, csizmazia etel: all him. at least 656 artist names, more than 2,700 tracks and about 15 billion plays. at the time he had more monthly listeners than avicii. on spotify's stress relief playlist, 41 of its 270 songs were his.

röhr didn't comment. his label, overtone studios, is owned by epidemic sound, and it said many of those names were old projects. spotify said this kind of music usually sits in its focus hub, where it competes less with pop artists.

then the music stopped needing a musician at all. in june 2025 a band called the velvet sundown put two albums on spotify. a man who said he spoke for the band gave rolling stone an interview, then said he had been running a hoax on the press. by early july, close to a million people a month were listening. then the band's spotify bio changed: it now called itself a synthetic music project, with the songs, the voice and the pictures made with the help of ai. a few days later it passed 1.1 million listeners a month.

deezer, another streaming service, counts the ai music sent to it. in january 2025 about one new track in ten was fully made by ai. by june 2026, on its busiest days, it was more than half: nearly 90,000 tracks a day. in a blind test of 9,000 people for deezer, 97 out of 100 couldn't tell the ai tracks apart. in october 2026, deezer said it will let you switch fully ai-made music off.

in april 2026 spotify launched a badge for verified artists. at launch it went to artists with real fans, not to what it calls functional music creators and content farms. in august it announced a separate label for artist profiles that may be made by ai, and said it would leave them out of its recommendations by default.

when a track gets me, i want to know who made it. on these playlists, that name often leads nowhere. the music playing in the background may be music nobody made for you.