THE SECRET WHITE NOISE SPAMMERS OF SPOTIFY

Spotify offers a playlist for every genre imaginable from pop to hip-hop, to new wave, to league of legends soundtracks. Some of these playlists get incredibly niche, including playlists for 'White Noise Baby Sleep.'

These producers record sounds of fans, or rain, or static and upload to Spotify gathering millions of listens. The Spotify curated playlist "Baby Sleep Aid: White Noise" (there are several other playlists of similar names created by other users) has 200 thousand followers. Producers such as Dream Shard, with five featured tracks on this particular playlist, has 185 thousand followers, and Astral Noise with three tracks on the playlist and 182 thousand followers of the individual artist.

Spotify only gives artists a fraction of a penny for each play of a song. But these sleep aid playlists are designed to be played over and over on repeat, sometimes all night. This inevitably leads to an accumulation of significant profits.

This phenomenon came to light after an anonymous interview with One Zero with a former producer for the UK company Ameritz, through their label Peak Records, produced hundreds of these white noise tracks that are "truly brainless to produce." They produce these tracks under the label Peak Records with artists that also have SEO-optimized names such as White Noise Baby Sleep and Relaxing Music Therapy.

Other niche sounds such as the Spotify created playlists Rain sounds 400k followers. Good for if you want to listen to the sounds of a downpour, a gentle rain, continuous rain, thunder with your rain, a rainy evening, or a cozy morning rain. And if you're really into the evening rain there is the Night Rain playlist created by Spotify with 900k followers and has a whole other set of rain recordings.

These playlists are optimized for SEO with keywords such as "sleep," "relaxing," or "night" for better discovery. These generic terms are ideal for Spotify's branding of being the place for "music for any mood." People are more likely to search for "relaxing music" rather than a specific lo-fi streamer name.

This may not seem like the idealized glamorous lifestyle of a musician with millions of plays, and no one is going to be humming along to a white noise melody. But these producers have certainly found a way to make a profit on Spotify, nevertheless.