Artists making music targeted at Spotify's hugely popular mood music playlists are back in the spotlight after a report in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter revealed that one such artist has now scored over fifteen billion streams. That has resulted in another frenzy of 'fake artist' chatter, because these musicians usually employ various pseudonyms when pushing their tracks to the streaming services.
It is true that Johan Röhr - the subject of the DN report - has employed more pseudonyms than most. The newspaper says that he has released more than 2700 tracks under 656 different artist names and 50 different composer aliases. With his catalogue getting frequent placements on at least 144 official Spotify playlists, DN says Röhr's music has scored over fifteen billion streams, which will have generated millions in royalties.
DN reckons that Röhr - "a 47 year old composer living in the Stockholm area" - is Sweden's "most played artist" on the streaming service. Avicii has slightly more streams overall, but Röhr has more listeners per month. On a global basis, he is, it says, "one of the 100 most streamed artists on Spotify of all time", beating Michael Jackson, Metallica and Mariah Carey, and achieving more than twice the number of plays as fellow Swedes Abba.
The debate around 'fake artists' is sometimes presented as a problem for the music industry akin to stream manipulation and streaming fraud, but it's actually something totally different. Basically, savvy musicians have spotted a gap in the market - super popular playlists that need a specific kind of music that few artists and labels are releasing. The DN report simply demonstrates how big the opportunity in that gap really is.
There is also sometimes a suggestion that one musician employing so many alternative names is somehow dishonest. But - while not on the scale of Röhr - artists releasing different music under different names isn't new, especially where a musician regularly writes music of different genres.
Prince Rogers Nelson, for example, was not only the artist known as Prince, and the artist known as The Artist (Formerly Known As Prince), but also the artist known as Jamie Starr, The Starr Company, Joey Coco, Alexander Nevermind and Christopher.
There is, however, a connection between the music made by Röhr and the recent debate around functional audio.
After the majors started calling for a rejig of the streaming business model last year, part of that conversation centred on audio that people use as background noise, or to aid with relaxation or sleep. The functional nature of that content can result in high levels of usage, which means - under the conventional model - it is allocated a decent slice of the monthly royalty pool.
Under pressure from the majors, Deezer has started removing third party functional audio like white noise and bird song, while Spotify has downgraded it, so each play now only counts as a fraction of a play.
Targeting white noise and bird song in this way is easy enough, but what about mood music which is also arguably functional audio? Segmenting and downgrading mood music is much trickier, because who decides which tracks are functional and which are 'proper' music?
DN's article also talks about Spotify prioritising certain tracks in its playlists because the people behind those tracks have agreed to accept a lower royalty rate.
That could be as a result of Spotify's Discovery Mode service - where artists and labels agree to a lower royalty on a track-by-track basis in return for prioritisation in the algorithm - or simply because a specific label has agreed to lower rates more generally.
Spotify declined to comment on the specifics of its deal with Röhr's label Overtone Studios - part of production music outfit Epidemic Sound, which has a history of crunching data from digital platforms to identify underserved categories of music, and then getting musicians to create music of that type.
However, with the majors boasting that they can get their artists better average per-stream payments because their prestigious catalogues enable them to negotiate better rates, why shouldn't an independent focused on mood music agree to a lower rate in return for getting more playlist placements, and therefore more plays and more money overall?
The Discovery Mode scheme has been controversial, with some people comparing it to payola, where people secretly pay radio stations to playlist their music. Although you could see it as the streaming equivalent of a label offering a retailer a discount for its CDs to be stocked by the door or next to the checkout.
Whatever the rights and wrongs around functional audio, and royalty discounts for algorithm and playlist kickbacks, it seems pointless to get angry about Röhr spotting a gap in the market, creating music to fill it and earning handsomely for his efforts. Even if doing so required 706 alter-egos.