The most popular musician you’ve never heard of? Johan Röhr has been streamed 15 billion times on Spotify

Johan Röhr, born on September 20, 1976, in Täby, north of Stockholm, has a very short Wikipedia page describing him as “a Swedish composer, producer and musician.” Although he has penned a few songs for some of the biggest Swedish pop stars, he is still unknown even in his country. However, according to an investigation published on Tuesday, March 19, by the daily Dagens Nyheter, his songs have been streamed more than 15 billion times on Spotify, ahead of British singer Elton John’s 11.6 billion streams and the Swedish group Abba’s 7.6 billion.

Röhr has a secret: he has 650 fake names, men and women, credited for at least 2,700 instrumental tracks. Among his pseudonyms are Jason Larochelle, Xiaoming Chu, and Juliusz Borkowska. The journalists from Dagens Nyheter cross-referenced several databases to find that the artist behind the compositions was Röhr. His phenomenal success is explained by the fact that his tracks are featured on over 100 popular playlists totaling more than 62 million subscribers.

For example, Röhr has produced 41 of the 270 tracks on the “Stress Relief” playlist, which has 1.5 million subscribers. His most listened-to melody is a piano interpretation of the lullaby Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star signed under the pseudonym Adelmar Borrego and streamed 249 million times.

A booming phenomenon

Röhr is not the only artist using this strategy. According to Dagens Nyheter, 91 Swedes are hiding behind 5,700 made-up artist names listed as the composers of more than 13,000 tracks. The “Peaceful Piano” playlist, which has almost 7.5 million users, includes melodies of around 100 completely unknown composers that the daily reporters have proven to be aliases of the Swedish composers.

Even more surprisingly, the investigation has revealed the existence of a system that encourages the booming phenomenon: in exchange for the promise of being featured on a popular playlist, guaranteeing a large number of streams, rights holders and labels accept lower royalties from Spotify – generally, a quarter of the amount usually paid to artists for each track streamed. If the numbers in Dagens Nyheter are accurate, the business is profitable. Röhr declared 32.7 million kroner (€2.9 million) in income in 2022, and the labels involved have seen their revenues soar in recent years.

The system undermines Spotify’s rhetoric, whose boss, Daniel Ek took the opportunity of the publication of the group’s latest results in early March to announce the payment of €8.3 billion to labels in 2023 in a bid to reaffirm that his company’s remuneration model favors creativity, allowing more and more artists to make a living from their music. Feeling they don’t earn enough, the artists themselves regularly criticize the model.