A “secret” Swedish artist is responsible for 650 fake artists on Spotify and 15 BILLION streams
People are always trying to game the system when it comes to payouts from streaming music services. One of those people is Johan Röhr, one of the most-streamed artists on all of Spotify with 15 BILLION streams.
Wait–who? And how is it possible he’s bigger than Britney Spears?
The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (“DN”) took a deep dive into Röhr and found that he has released more than 2,700 tracks under 50 composer alias and 656 different artist names. Every hear of Minik Knudsen, Mingmei Hsueh, Csizmazia Etel, and Adelmar Borrego? All Röhr pseudonyms.
His specialty seems to be “peace piano” mood music. Collectively, those tracks have been streamed about 15 billion times, making Röhr Sweden’s most-played artist, beating out ABBA and Avicii on a monthly basis. He’s also one of the 100 most-streamed artists of all time on Spotify, doing better than Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Metallica. And he’s not too far behing The Beatles.
Röhr isn’t a fake, though. He’s a professional conductor and composer working with a company called Overtone Studios, a source of mood music. Its CEO, a guy named Niklas Brantberg said this to The Guardian: “[W]e maintain that diversely talented artists should be able to publish music across different artist names – which is commonplace in the industry – spanning various genres and vibes, with different collaborators, and at different points in their musical journey. It allows them to unleash the full range of their creative potential.”
Röhr is making good bank, raking in millions in royalties every year.
Read the whole story here.
