Spotify and Swedish Gangster Rap

Okay, don’t do this. We see all and know half of it, and if you go shady, we’ll tell our local priest, and you’ll get a stern lecture. But it’s out there, and so are we, and here we all are.

As a crime writer, I’m always looking to describe people doing, yes, shady s**t, so I scour the 24-hour news cycle until I mine gold. But today, I mined streams. Swedish streams.

Oh, yes, crime in the pristine valley! Nope. Spotify streams. Sweden’s got a problem. Maybe we all do. You may think that Spotify is rigged as far as who gets to the top of their charts, who gets so many streams, and I’m not saying you’re right or wrong when it comes to the nefarious overlords at Spotify. But people can buy fake streams. Like pay 50 and get a thousand streams, so on and so forth. And those companies just use armies of bots to stream your song, and your stats go up. And you end up picking up real people who see a “rising star” and want to sniff the stardust a little. And then Spotify pays you a pittance. You get a million streams, Spotify pays five grand.

So maybe you pay ten grand to buy a million streams, and Spotify pays you five grand. Bad deal, right? Not so much if you’re a money launderer.

So this is what’s happening. In Sweden right now. Gangster rap is big there. And those gangsters don’t play. Shootings, bombings, all that. Yeah, in Sweden! So they got artists that are in the gangs, they put their work out on Spotify, and get launched up, as just described, and they’re basically a criminal ATM.

Spotify says that less than 1% of their streams are fraudulent. And Sweden says they have no evidence that this is a major thing. But people in Swedish gangs, on condition of anonymity, say that the stuff happens because they’re the ones doing it.

Moral of the story? Invest in a CD collection. And also money laundering is a pretty serious felony here in the United States, and elsewhere.