Be wary of assuming that every artist you see mentioned in this context must be a fake / fraudulent one!) (It’s important to note that innocent, not-fake-at-all artists could get sucked in to this kind of investigation, thanks to the possibility of lean-back listening where people don’t remember what artists they’ve heard.

“These artists were removed because we detected abnormal streaming activity in relation to their content,” said Spotify’s spokesperson in a statement to Music Ally this morning. The artists mentioned in the BBC piece have since been removed from Spotify. While some have raised the topic of a Facebook security flaw that was revealed in September 2018, there’s no evidence at this point that any Spotify accounts have been hacked as a result of it. It’s possible that people have listened to some of these artists without realising it – for example in Spotify’s radio feature, or if they’ve been served up as recommendations under the feature where Spotify carries on playing related songs when an album or playlist finishes.īut some users have been suggesting a more-worrying cause: that their accounts have been hacked in some way. “Interestingly, the bands also have little to no presence on the rest of the internet… Many listeners (including this reporter) never actively searched for or played tracks by bands like Bergenulo Five, but found that their music ended up being logged in their listening history anyway.” Apart from being musically unremarkable, they generally have a few things in common: short songs with few or no lyrics, illustrated with generic cover art, and short, non-descriptive song titles,” it reported. “They have names like Bergenulo Five, Bratte Night, DJ Bruej and Doublin Night. It identified a selection of artists who may be involved, and even invents a genre for them: ‘mysterycore’. An investigation by the BBC Trending team raises some important questions for the streaming service – but also for its rivals and the wider industry. Spotify’s ‘2018 Wrapped’ promotion had plenty of people boasting about how much time they’d spent listening to their favourite artists last year.īut for some Spotify users, the Wrapped microsite was more baffling: if some of their ‘favourite’ artists were acts they had no memory of listening to.

Spotify for artists wrapped 2018