On his very short Wikipedia page, Johan Röhr, born September 20, 1976 in Täby, north of Stockholm, is presented as “a Swedish composer, producer and musician”. He may have signed a few songs for big names in Swedish pop music, but he nonetheless remains a complete unknown, including in his country. And yet, according to a survey by the daily Dagens Nyheter, published Tuesday March 19, his songs have been listened to more than 15 billion times on the streaming platform Spotify, placing him ahead of British singer Elton John (11.6 billion streams) or the Swedish group ABBA (7.6 billion).
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His secret? Johan Röhr is hiding behind 650 false names of artists, men and women, who together have signed at least 2,700 instrumental pieces. Among these pseudonyms: Jason Larochelle, Xiaoming Chu or Juliusz Borkowska. Dagens Nyheter journalists crossed several databases, which allowed them to trace the famous Johan Röhr, whose phenomenal success can be explained by the fact that his songs appear on more than a hundred particularly popular playlists. popular, totaling more than 62 million subscribers.
On the one entitled “Stress Relief”, which has 1.5 million subscribers, he signed 41 of the 270 titles. His most listened to melody is a piano rendition of the lullaby Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star, penned by the pseudonym Adelmar Borrego, and which has been listened to 249 million times.
Booming phenomenon
Johan Röhr is not the only one in this situation. According to the Dagens Nyheter investigation, 91 Swedes are hiding behind 5,700 false artist names, responsible for more than 13,000 songs. Example: the “Peaceful Piano” playlist, which has nearly 7.5 million users, includes the melodies of around a hundred completely unknown composers, which journalists were able to demonstrate were in fact aliases belonging to these Swedish.
Even more surprising, the investigation reveals the existence of a system which favors this booming phenomenon: in exchange for the promise of appearing on a popular playlist, guaranteeing a large number of plays, the rights holders and labels accept lower royalties from Spotify – generally a quarter of the amount usually paid to artists for each song listened to. A juicy business, according to the figures presented by Dagens Nyheter, since Johan Röhr declared 32.7 million crowns (2.9 million euros) in revenue in 2022, and the labels concerned saw their revenue increase in arrow in recent years.
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