Sophia Ciocca, writing for Hacker Noon:

The exact mechanisms behind NLP are beyond the scope of this article, but here’s what happens on a very high level: Spotify crawls the web constantly looking for blog posts and other written texts about music, and figures out what people are saying about specific artists and songs — what adjectives and language is frequently used about those songs, and which other artists and songs are also discussed alongside them.

While I don’t know the specifics of how Spotify chooses to then process their scraped data, I can give you an understanding of how the Echo Nest used to work with them. They would bucket them up into what they call “cultural vectors” or “top terms.” Each artist and song had thousands of daily-changing top terms. Each term had a weight associated, which reveals how important the description is (roughly, the probability that someone will describe music as that term.)

Spotify has begun removing white-supremacist music from its service:

Spotify says it has removed an array of white-supremacist acts from its streaming service that had been flagged as racist “hate bands” by the Southern Poverty Law Center three years ago.[…]

A Spotify spokeswoman told Billboard in a statement that while the music in its catalog comes from hundreds of thousands of record companies and aggregators all over the world, and those are “at first hand responsible” for the content they deliver, “illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us.”

Spotify has reportedly reached the 60 million paid subscriber mark:

Spotify now has 60 million paying subscribers, adding 10 million subscribers in less than five months, a spokeswoman for the music streaming company said on Monday.

The New York Times:

For the last week, the music industry has been buzzing over the accusation that Spotify’s playlists are dotted with hundreds of supposedly “fake” artists, with names like Amity Cadet and Lo Mimieux, who are racking up tens of millions of streams yet have no public profile — no Facebook page, no Twitter feed, not even a face.

And:

Peter Sandberg, a 27-year-old composer in Sweden who has created a number of tracks on these playlists, called the term unfair.

“I’m a composer trying to find a way to grow and spread my work,” Mr. Sandberg wrote in an email relayed through an intermediary, “and to be called fake is not something I appreciate.” (Mr. Sandberg, who records music under his own name as well, does have a social media presence, making him a less anonymous figure than many of the other creators of this music.)

This entire story is strange, but when companies like Spotify can get computers to produce hits for their playlists with minimal human involvement, that’s when it gets really weird.

Adam K. Raymond, writing for Vulture:

A sub version of this ruse is to create an “artist” for one ripoff song and use the same name as the original. For example, 1.7 million people looking for “Demons” by Imagine Dragons have instead listened to “Demons” by Imagine Demons. It’s the only track this “band” has on Spotify.

And:

Streaming’s impact on the way artists make music goes all the way to the top. Take Chris Brown, whose upcoming album Heartbreak on Full Moon has 40 tracks, and not because he has so much to say. The famously unscrupulous pop star has found a way to boost his streaming numbers, which in turn inflate sale figures, and will, he hopes, send his album shooting up the charts quicker than it otherwise would.

And:

That means that songs on playlists generally get a ton of plays. It’s why there are countless articles providing tips on how a band can get their music on a playlist. It’s also why Spotify is allegedly paying producers to create fake artists whose music can rack up plays without costing the company any more than what they paid up front.

Liz Pelly, in a fantastic article about the secret lives of playlists:

Not all Spotify playlists are created equally. To begin understanding this, look at them closely. Literally. Choose a playlist in Browse, and look at its cover art. Look in the corner for a logo. Look at another. Look at all of them.The vast majority of their square, tinted, Instagram-like front covers will wear a tiny Spotify insignia, that little circle with slanted waves—the artist who designed the logo says it is a visualization of streaming. On other playlists, you’ll occasionally notice different logos: the thick cursive word Filtr, the all-caps logo for Topsify, or simple rounded text reading Digster. These are the playlisting brands owned by the major labels: Filtr by Sony, Topsify by Warner, and Digster by Universal. Very rarely you might see an independent label or brand logo.

And:

Pay-to-playlist is real. For labels to influence Spotify-created playlists, Jeff describes a whole network of back-scratching and gatekeeping. While money might not be directly changing hands between majors and Spotify for direct access to playlist, there is a bigger picture where labels and Spotify provide value for each other – things like driving social traffic by getting artists to post Spotify links, doing paid media, and advertising. “If you can go to these [streaming] accounts and say, we have a $5,000 ad plan, and we are going to drive exclusively to Spotify…” he explains. Well, isn’t that a relationship they will want to keep mutually beneficial?