Analysis
Who fills Spotify's lofi and focus playlists: we counted
· SplitScout · 5 min read
SplitScout reads Spotify's own editorial playlists every day and traces every track to the label that released it. On 13 October 2026 we analyzed 43 of them (lofi, jazz beats, chill, ambient, focus and sleep), 4,072 places in total, to see who actually fills them.
172
places held by two companies named as suppliers of Spotify's Perfect Fit Content
23 of 100
tracks in Deep Focus that come from those two companies
0
places for labels from the SplitScout catalog in Deep Focus, Sleep, Stress Relief and Ambient Relaxation
The two companies are Epidemic Sound, with its mood music label Overtone Studios, and Firefly Entertainment. Between them they appear in 27 of the 43 playlists. Both were named in Liz Pelly's investigation for Harper's Magazine as providers for Perfect Fit Content, a Spotify program that, according to her reporting, places background music commissioned on cheaper terms into mood playlists. Spotify has denied creating fake artists and says it pays royalties on every track it streams.
What the investigation found
- •Pelly traces Perfect Fit Content back to around 2017. From then on, by her account, playlist editors could see in their dashboards how well each playlist used commissioned music that came with better margins for Spotify.
- •By 2023, she reports, a dedicated team was monitoring several hundred playlists, among them ambient, sleep and focus.
- •Internal Slack messages she obtained list six providers: Epidemic Sound, Firefly Entertainment, Hush Hush LLC, Catfarm Music AB, Queenstreet Content AB and Industria Works.
- •Editors who pushed back on the program, her sources say, were replaced by editors who went along with it.
- •A jazz musician she interviewed described the work: study the existing playlists, write charts in that style, record several tracks in one session for the producer. He thought he was making anonymous library music and did not know where it would end up.
- •Spotify told Harper's that the background music meets listener demand, that its tracking was ordinary data work, and that it was not expanding the program.
The playlists where indie lofi labels land their releases and the playlists filled with background music are mostly not the same playlists.
How we got here
2016
Music Business Worldwide reports that Spotify pays flat fees for jazz, chill and piano tracks released under invented names.
2017
Spotify tells Billboard it has never created fake artists. The music writer David Turner finds Epidemic Sound tracks in place of Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins in the Ambient Chill playlist.
2022
Dagens Nyheter links Firefly Entertainment to about 830 artist names.
March 2023
A-P Records, owned by Epidemic Sound, becomes Overtone Studios and describes itself as making mood music for focus, relaxation and dinner.
March 2024
Dagens Nyheter reports that one Swedish composer, Johan Röhr, released more than 2,700 tracks under at least 650 artist names, with about 15 billion streams. Overtone confirms he releases music under pseudonyms.
January 2025
Harper's publishes Pelly's investigation, an excerpt from her book Mood Machine.
October 2026
SplitScout counts 172 places for the two named companies across 43 editorial playlists.
Our method
Every day SplitScout reads the track lists of the editorial playlists in our scenes. For each track we take the label from its album's ℗ line. We know the label for 3,346 of the 4,072 places (82%). The other 726 are unknown, so every number here is a floor, not a ceiling. A company counts under the name on its releases.
The two companies, by our count
- •Epidemic Sound and Overtone Studios: 87 places in 24 playlists.
- •Firefly Entertainment: 85 places in 19 playlists.
- Deep Focus23Epidemic and Overtone 19, Firefly 4
- lofi cafe17Firefly 14
- Feel Good Beats13
- Sleep11
- Chill Evening9
- Stress Relief9
- Sunny Beats9
- Ambient Relaxation8
- lofi chill7
- sad lofi7
They have no tracks at all in new lofi, best of new lofi 2025, Jazz Vibes, Jazzy Beats, Lounge Jazz, oriental lofi, bossa lofi, Jazz Rap, New Ambient, Ambient Essentials, Ambient Japan, movements., Sci-Fi Scapes or Wild Ambience.
The biggest owners are not in the reporting
- Calm and Collected Music Group289Chill Caterpillar, Chill Palm, Chill Tone
- Tombola Music131
- Epidemic Sound and Overtone87
- Firefly Entertainment85
- Settle58
- urbanundergrounds36
Calm and Collected Music Group, a New York company founded in 2019, holds the most places of any single owner, 7% of all of them, in 26 playlists. On LinkedIn it describes a catalog of more than 30,000 copyrights built around wellness and functional listening. It is not named in any Perfect Fit Content reporting we found. Tombola Music has 131 places, most of them in Sleep (23), Ambient Relaxation (20), Deep Focus (13) and Stress Relief (12). We found no public information about who runs it.
What it means if you send demos
Labels in the SplitScout catalog hold 822 of the 4,072 places, one in five. They are spread unevenly: none at all in the sleep, focus and relaxation lists, and the most in the lofi and jazz beats lists.
- Jazz Vibes62
- Jazzy Beats58
- best of new lofi 202554
- Smooth Jazz Beats45
- new lofi38
- lofi sleep38
When a label tells you it lands releases on editorial playlists, these are the lists it means. Each label's page on SplitScout shows the placements we found for it, playlist by playlist: /labels
Sources
The counts are ours. The background on these companies comes from the reporting below.
- 1.Liz Pelly, The Ghosts in the Machine, Harper's Magazine, January 2025: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
- 2.Epidemic Sound on Overtone Studios, March 2023: https://corporate.epidemicsound.com/press-and-media/press-releases/2023/a-p-records-announces-rebranding-to-overtone-studios-bolstering-its-mission-to-create-mood-music-for-every-moment/
- 3.Music Business Worldwide on the Dagens Nyheter report, March 2024: https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/this-secret-composer-is-behind-650-fake-artists-on-spotify-his-music-has-been-streamed-15bn-times-on-the-platform-report/
- 4.Calm and Collected Music Group on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/calm-and-collected-music
- 5.The full history with Spotify's responses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_on_Spotify
Counts are a snapshot of 13 October 2026. Playlists change every week, and so do these numbers.