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@ -13394,61 +13540,60 @@
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@ -45,16 +45,12 @@ On a Friday afternoon in June 2017, Anthony Flores and his girlfriend, Anna Moor
As far as anyone seems to know, the meeting at Kippy’s happened entirely by chance. Sawusch’s office was nearby, but otherwise he and the couple traveled in different circles. He examined eyes; they owned a yoga studio. In any case, by that evening, they had the keys to the doctor’s silver Tesla. A week later, Flores texted Sawusch to offer his and Moore’s help: “Our desire is to add ease and flow to your life and be of great service.” Sawusch responded, calling the couple “the BEST friends I have ever met in my entire life.” They moved from their apartment into his Malibu beach house that same day. In a few months, the doctor would be dead. For the next six years, people would wonder: Were Flores and Moore scammers who stumbled upon the perfect mark in a vegan-ice-cream shop? Or were they simply trying to help a man coming off the worst year of his life?
As far as anyone seems to know, the meeting at Kippy’s happened entirely by chance. Sawusch’s office was nearby, but otherwise he and the couple traveled in different circles. He examined eyes; they owned a yoga studio. In any case, by that evening, they had the keys to the doctor’s silver Tesla. A week later, Flores texted Sawusch to offer his and Moore’s help: “Our desire is to add ease and flow to your life and be of great service.” Sawusch responded, calling the couple “the BEST friends I have ever met in my entire life.” They moved from their apartment into his Malibu beach house that same day. In a few months, the doctor would be dead. For the next six years, people would wonder: Were Flores and Moore scammers who stumbled upon the perfect mark in a vegan-ice-cream shop? Or were they simply trying to help a man coming off the worst year of his life?
Moore teaching a yoga class in Fresno. Photo: Fulton Yoga Collective
The version of the couple Sawusch met that day was just their latest iteration; they had both reinvented themselves several times over. Flores was raised in a lower-middle-class Mexican American family in Clovis, a conservative agricultural city outside Fresno in the humid Central Valley. In 1994, he graduated from Clovis High School, where he was voted both prom king and “Most Artistic.” Instead of going to college, he started a window-washing business, targeting clients in wealthy neighborhoods and winning them over with his warm and engaging demeanor. People simply liked him. “Word just got out,” says his childhood best friend, Dave Brose. “He was actually making a lot of money.” In 2005, a strange situation put him in the public eye: He learned that he’d been unnecessarily paying his ex-girlfriend Amber Frey child support — $175 of his hard-earned window-washing money every month for four years. Frey had just been outed as Scott Peterson’s mistress, which meant the alimony situation landed Flores all over the news, looking foolish. “He got swindled big time. That hurt him. It really, really did,” Brose says.
The version of the couple Sawusch met that day was just their latest iteration; they had both reinvented themselves several times over. Flores was raised in a lower-middle-class Mexican American family in Clovis, a conservative agricultural city outside Fresno in the humid Central Valley. In 1994, he graduated from Clovis High School, where he was voted both prom king and “Most Artistic.” Instead of going to college, he started a window-washing business, targeting clients in wealthy neighborhoods and winning them over with his warm and engaging demeanor. People simply liked him. “Word just got out,” says his childhood best friend, Dave Brose. “He was actually making a lot of money.” In 2005, a strange situation put him in the public eye: He learned that he’d been unnecessarily paying his ex-girlfriend Amber Frey child support — $175 of his hard-earned window-washing money every month for four years. Frey had just been outed as Scott Peterson’s mistress, which meant the alimony situation landed Flores all over the news, looking foolish. “He got swindled big time. That hurt him. It really, really did,” Brose says.
Whether out of humiliation or a desire to escape Clovis and live like the clients whose windows he washed, he got to work developing a new persona: Anton David, “Global Hairdresser,” a roving artist with shears who liked to cut and color with a cold beer in his back pocket. He got a job at the Lotus Salon in Fresno and soon after was quoted in the Fresno *Bee* about his classic runway-style hairdos — meant “to be creative and show the artistic side of what we do.” He wrote on LinkedIn, “I’m in love with making things more beautiful.” The new name, the quotes, the elevated title — all of it made his friends laugh. “Flores was a budding hairdresser. He was just starting out,” says fellow hairstylist Atila Vass. Still, in 2007, Flores graduated from the Sassoon Academy, a prestigious hair-cutting training center. “It’s crazy to think Flores ever made it through Sassoon,” Vass says. “It’s very structured over there. And he’s not structured at all in any way.” Nor was he financially savvy. “There was never a price,” a former client remembers of Flores’s freelance hair-cutting services. “It was just ‘Send me what you feel is the right amount.’ And he would show up in a coat and tie to do it.”
Whether out of humiliation or a desire to escape Clovis and live like the clients whose windows he washed, he got to work developing a new persona: Anton David, “Global Hairdresser,” a roving artist with shears who liked to cut and color with a cold beer in his back pocket. He got a job at the Lotus Salon in Fresno and soon after was quoted in the Fresno *Bee* about his classic runway-style hairdos — meant “to be creative and show the artistic side of what we do.” He wrote on LinkedIn, “I’m in love with making things more beautiful.” The new name, the quotes, the elevated title — all of it made his friends laugh. “Flores was a budding hairdresser. He was just starting out,” says fellow hairstylist Atila Vass. Still, in 2007, Flores graduated from the Sassoon Academy, a prestigious hair-cutting training center. “It’s crazy to think Flores ever made it through Sassoon,” Vass says. “It’s very structured over there. And he’s not structured at all in any way.” Nor was he financially savvy. “There was never a price,” a former client remembers of Flores’s freelance hair-cutting services. “It was just ‘Send me what you feel is the right amount.’ And he would show up in a coat and tie to do it.”
In 2009, Flores made the move to Los Angeles to an apartment in Playa Vista. He promptly converted the place into a salon. “He removed the carpet, we did plumbing in there, and I’m just like, ‘Dude, you know all of this is illegal and they’re going to charge you?’” says his friend Octavio Solis. “He was too much about partying, not about work. He was always trying to live up to that Hollywood lifestyle, to give off that successful perception.” Indeed, Flores was evicted soon after and moved in with a girlfriend who later claimed in court that Flores withheld a portion of the rent on their Marina del Rey apartment. Still, others were impressed with his natural charm and his connections — or his connections to connections. “I would get the most random call, like, ‘Hey, do you want to help me and Octavio at Eddie Murphy’s house to put oil on these bikini models?’” says Nathan Love, a blockchain specialist who met Flores in a hot tub in L.A. “He is one of the most charismatic people I know.”
In 2009, Flores made the move to Los Angeles to an apartment in Playa Vista. He promptly converted the place into a salon. “He removed the carpet, we did plumbing in there, and I’m just like, ‘Dude, you know all of this is illegal and they’re going to charge you?’” says his friend Octavio Solis. “He was too much about partying, not about work. He was always trying to live up to that Hollywood lifestyle, to give off that successful perception.” Indeed, Flores was evicted soon after and moved in with a girlfriend who later claimed in court that Flores withheld a portion of the rent on their Marina del Rey apartment. Still, others were impressed with his natural charm and his connections — or his connections to connections. “I would get the most random call, like, ‘Hey, do you want to help me and Octavio at Eddie Murphy’s house to put oil on these bikini models?’” says Nathan Love, a blockchain specialist who met Flores in a hot tub in L.A. “He is one of the most charismatic people I know.”
Flores, Sawusch, and Moore, after they’d moved into his house. Photo: U.S. District Court, Central District of California
While Flores was turning himself into Anton David, Moore was trying to become an actor. The daughter of two academics in the Bay Area, she graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and completed a summer course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Afterward, she quickly landed a promising role as “blonde student” in the Uma Thurman drama *The Life Before Her Eyes.* But from there, her projects never seemed to work out. In 2009, she got the lead in *Fighting Fish,* a dark meditation on incest that was meant to be her big break. “She was definitely the star of that movie,” says director Annette Apitz. “I think she felt like it was going to jump-start her career.” The film failed to find distribution. Undeterred, Moore moved to L.A., where she fell into a serious relationship. “I believed it was love at first sight,” her new boyfriend wrote in an unpublished essay about their time together. “So she moved in.” Moore could be hot and cold. She didn’t want him to post about their relationship on Facebook because, she said, “it’s not good for my acting career.” A few weeks into cohabiting, he overheard her talking about him to an ex on the phone, saying, “He does have a really nice place near the beach, but he’s a big dork.” “Then she hung up and saw me standing there,” he writes, “and looked at me and said, ‘I am not a bad person.’” The relationship lasted only three months.
While Flores was turning himself into Anton David, Moore was trying to become an actor. The daughter of two academics in the Bay Area, she graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and completed a summer course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Afterward, she quickly landed a promising role as “blonde student” in the Uma Thurman drama *The Life Before Her Eyes.* But from there, her projects never seemed to work out. In 2009, she got the lead in *Fighting Fish,* a dark meditation on incest that was meant to be her big break. “She was definitely the star of that movie,” says director Annette Apitz. “I think she felt like it was going to jump-start her career.” The film failed to find distribution. Undeterred, Moore moved to L.A., where she fell into a serious relationship. “I believed it was love at first sight,” her new boyfriend wrote in an unpublished essay about their time together. “So she moved in.” Moore could be hot and cold. She didn’t want him to post about their relationship on Facebook because, she said, “it’s not good for my acting career.” A few weeks into cohabiting, he overheard her talking about him to an ex on the phone, saying, “He does have a really nice place near the beach, but he’s a big dork.” “Then she hung up and saw me standing there,” he writes, “and looked at me and said, ‘I am not a bad person.’” The relationship lasted only three months.
Moore packed what few personal items she had and began house-sitting for a friend in Beverly Hills. But soon after she moved in, she started dating an “acroyogi” named Wayne Hoover, who invited her to come live with him in a communal house in Santa Monica called the Little Kingdom. The three-bedroom was home to a rotating cast of aspiring artists, healers, and Hollywood-adjacents, all of whom agreed upon a strict vegan, alcohol-free living environment. When their relationship fizzled, Hoover continued to pay his ex-girlfriend’s rent. “I was very trust driven,” he says. “I never felt like she was taking advantage of me.” Things soured as he watched her bring other men into the room.
Moore packed what few personal items she had and began house-sitting for a friend in Beverly Hills. But soon after she moved in, she started dating an “acroyogi” named Wayne Hoover, who invited her to come live with him in a communal house in Santa Monica called the Little Kingdom. The three-bedroom was home to a rotating cast of aspiring artists, healers, and Hollywood-adjacents, all of whom agreed upon a strict vegan, alcohol-free living environment. When their relationship fizzled, Hoover continued to pay his ex-girlfriend’s rent. “I was very trust driven,” he says. “I never felt like she was taking advantage of me.” Things soured as he watched her bring other men into the room.
@ -63,8 +59,6 @@ Fortunately, soon after, Moore met Flores at a vegan potluck in Santa Monica. It
The couple soon became Fresno microcelebrities — the local kid turned spiritualist and the on-the-rise starlet — complete with a multigenerational crew of yogis. En masse, the crew would attend Burning Man or show up at local art nights. They had been at it for five years when, in June 2017, they met Sawusch.
The couple soon became Fresno microcelebrities — the local kid turned spiritualist and the on-the-rise starlet — complete with a multigenerational crew of yogis. En masse, the crew would attend Burning Man or show up at local art nights. They had been at it for five years when, in June 2017, they met Sawusch.
Flores and Moore, the weekend after they met the doctor, posing with his borrowed Tesla. Photo: Anna Moore/Facebook
It hadn’t been a banner year for Sawusch. Eight months before he met Moore and Flores, he failed to show up at the office where, for decades, he had treated generations of wealthy Pacific Palisades families. (“I remember some Spielbergs,” says a former colleague.) When sheriff’s deputies performed a wellness check at his Malibu home, they found the doctor stark naked and in a manic state. It wasn’t the first time they’d discovered him this way. In previous wellness checks, he’d had cuts and scrapes all over his body, his hands badly burned. This time, as the waves crashed outside his cantilevered beach house, he turned to the officers and said, “I am God. My birthday is when the universe was created.” In the months that followed, Sawusch attempted suicide. He drifted in and out of addiction facilities where he was treated for bipolar disorder. An attending psychiatrist described him as “grossly psychotic.”
It hadn’t been a banner year for Sawusch. Eight months before he met Moore and Flores, he failed to show up at the office where, for decades, he had treated generations of wealthy Pacific Palisades families. (“I remember some Spielbergs,” says a former colleague.) When sheriff’s deputies performed a wellness check at his Malibu home, they found the doctor stark naked and in a manic state. It wasn’t the first time they’d discovered him this way. In previous wellness checks, he’d had cuts and scrapes all over his body, his hands badly burned. This time, as the waves crashed outside his cantilevered beach house, he turned to the officers and said, “I am God. My birthday is when the universe was created.” In the months that followed, Sawusch attempted suicide. He drifted in and out of addiction facilities where he was treated for bipolar disorder. An attending psychiatrist described him as “grossly psychotic.”
This all seemed wildly out of character to people who knew Sawusch as the gentle technical wizard who had attended the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine before completing an ophthalmological residency at Johns Hopkins. Some of his work was groundbreaking — in the ’90s, he “performed the first finite element modeling of the effects of surgery on the cornea,” says his former supervisor Dr. Peter McDonnell, who watched in awe as his young protégé advanced methods for surgically reshaping the outermost layer of the eye to treat vision problems like nearsightedness and astigmatism.
This all seemed wildly out of character to people who knew Sawusch as the gentle technical wizard who had attended the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine before completing an ophthalmological residency at Johns Hopkins. Some of his work was groundbreaking — in the ’90s, he “performed the first finite element modeling of the effects of surgery on the cornea,” says his former supervisor Dr. Peter McDonnell, who watched in awe as his young protégé advanced methods for surgically reshaping the outermost layer of the eye to treat vision problems like nearsightedness and astigmatism.
@ -91,8 +85,6 @@ On the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend in 2018, Cheatham arrived for her us
Around a week after his death, Moore and Flores held a seaside funeral for Sawusch. Cheatham went, as did several other employees from the house. Everyone was bereft and unnerved at the loss of this soft-spoken person they had been tending to near constantly for months. “I couldn’t believe it,” Cheatham says. “I was so sad that he died. They were telling me that they were hoping he would get over the spell that he was in.” But that day, Flores and Moore also managed to spend $7,017.73 at Ted Baker, $289.85 at Erewhon, $220.50 at Tory Burch, $992.25 at Coach, and $2,477.90 at the Apple Store. They dined at Nobu, too. Later, Flores wrote an obituary for the doctor that ran in the Malibu *Times.* It said Sawusch died “peacefully, watching wildlife from his seaside balcony and listening to the waves of the Pacific.”
Around a week after his death, Moore and Flores held a seaside funeral for Sawusch. Cheatham went, as did several other employees from the house. Everyone was bereft and unnerved at the loss of this soft-spoken person they had been tending to near constantly for months. “I couldn’t believe it,” Cheatham says. “I was so sad that he died. They were telling me that they were hoping he would get over the spell that he was in.” But that day, Flores and Moore also managed to spend $7,017.73 at Ted Baker, $289.85 at Erewhon, $220.50 at Tory Burch, $992.25 at Coach, and $2,477.90 at the Apple Store. They dined at Nobu, too. Later, Flores wrote an obituary for the doctor that ran in the Malibu *Times.* It said Sawusch died “peacefully, watching wildlife from his seaside balcony and listening to the waves of the Pacific.”
Moore at Sawusch’s house, months after he’d died. Photo: Anna Moore/Facebook
As Sawusch’s mother and sister attempted to settle his debts — including months of rent owed on the abandoned Palisades practice — they saw something strange. There were two creditors’ claims for $1 million each, one from Flores and one from Moore. These late-in-life caretakers were claiming they were owed one-third of his vast estate, including the beach house, which would together amount to around $20 million. The family filed a civil suit alleging dependent abuse, undue influence, and fraud and alerted the FBI, which began to look into charges of mail and wire fraud. By then, Moore and Flores had already gotten to work ensuring they could hold on to the house. Shortly after Sawusch died, Flores texted his friend Nathan Love, the cryptocurrency specialist: “I am reaching out for some investment advice,” Flores wrote. “Any chance you can help steer me in the right direction? It’s a very new, unfamiliar situation for me.” Love remembers taking Flores’s call. “My only conversation was trying to help him understand how cryptocurrencies work, layering, cold storage versus hot storage versus 401(k)s,” he says. “I didn’t think he was smart enough to do any of that.” What they did instead was open more bank accounts, including one in South Dakota into which they moved more of the doctor’s money.
As Sawusch’s mother and sister attempted to settle his debts — including months of rent owed on the abandoned Palisades practice — they saw something strange. There were two creditors’ claims for $1 million each, one from Flores and one from Moore. These late-in-life caretakers were claiming they were owed one-third of his vast estate, including the beach house, which would together amount to around $20 million. The family filed a civil suit alleging dependent abuse, undue influence, and fraud and alerted the FBI, which began to look into charges of mail and wire fraud. By then, Moore and Flores had already gotten to work ensuring they could hold on to the house. Shortly after Sawusch died, Flores texted his friend Nathan Love, the cryptocurrency specialist: “I am reaching out for some investment advice,” Flores wrote. “Any chance you can help steer me in the right direction? It’s a very new, unfamiliar situation for me.” Love remembers taking Flores’s call. “My only conversation was trying to help him understand how cryptocurrencies work, layering, cold storage versus hot storage versus 401(k)s,” he says. “I didn’t think he was smart enough to do any of that.” What they did instead was open more bank accounts, including one in South Dakota into which they moved more of the doctor’s money.
It took until November 2018 for a judge to formally freeze their personal bank accounts, so all summer and fall, they lived in the beach house and spent Sawusch’s money. Even after the accounts were locked down, their lifestyle appeared unaffected. They stayed in the house. Nearly a year after Sawusch died, Moore posted a photo to Facebook of her sitting on top of the doctor’s piano gazing out onto the Pacific. “Living in L.A. is like being in a giant jam band,” she wrote. “Everyone knows when it’s their time to shine and also when it’s time to hold down a rock-solid rhythm.” By then, according to the charges that would eventually be filed against them, they had stolen $2.7 million of the doctor’s money.
It took until November 2018 for a judge to formally freeze their personal bank accounts, so all summer and fall, they lived in the beach house and spent Sawusch’s money. Even after the accounts were locked down, their lifestyle appeared unaffected. They stayed in the house. Nearly a year after Sawusch died, Moore posted a photo to Facebook of her sitting on top of the doctor’s piano gazing out onto the Pacific. “Living in L.A. is like being in a giant jam band,” she wrote. “Everyone knows when it’s their time to shine and also when it’s time to hold down a rock-solid rhythm.” By then, according to the charges that would eventually be filed against them, they had stolen $2.7 million of the doctor’s money.
@ -105,92 +97,6 @@ In June, Flores arrived for his criminal sentencing in courtroom nine at the Fir
Before the judge made his pronouncement, Flores removed his surgical mask to read a letter he’d written to Sawusch. “We were like brothers,” he said in a voice Halitaj didn’t recognize — higher, sweeter than the one she’d known from her time in the house. “I feel so ashamed standing here and admitting that I wronged you, brother, for even a second losing sight of the true nature of what we had.” It would always bring him peace, he said, to know he’d seen “life and fire in your eyes.” He dropped his head. “I am sorry for my crimes,” he said. “My sincerest apologies to the Sawusch family.” U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson was unmoved. “When Flores met that victim at the ice-cream parlor, there was only one thing on his mind,” he said, “a scheme to hijack this man’s fortune.” Flores turned to the front row to face his mother, who remained stoic behind sunglasses as her son was sentenced to 188 months in federal prison, or more than 15 years. As the hushed galley emptied out, Flores’s closing words hung in the stale air: “I love you, Mark. And I will never forget you. I wish we could have had more time together.”
Before the judge made his pronouncement, Flores removed his surgical mask to read a letter he’d written to Sawusch. “We were like brothers,” he said in a voice Halitaj didn’t recognize — higher, sweeter than the one she’d known from her time in the house. “I feel so ashamed standing here and admitting that I wronged you, brother, for even a second losing sight of the true nature of what we had.” It would always bring him peace, he said, to know he’d seen “life and fire in your eyes.” He dropped his head. “I am sorry for my crimes,” he said. “My sincerest apologies to the Sawusch family.” U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson was unmoved. “When Flores met that victim at the ice-cream parlor, there was only one thing on his mind,” he said, “a scheme to hijack this man’s fortune.” Flores turned to the front row to face his mother, who remained stoic behind sunglasses as her son was sentenced to 188 months in federal prison, or more than 15 years. As the hushed galley emptied out, Flores’s closing words hung in the stale air: “I love you, Mark. And I will never forget you. I wish we could have had more time together.”
- [How Fashion Critic Cathy Horyn Lost (Then Found) Her Personal Style](https://www.thecut.com/article/cathy-horyn-how-i-lost-and-found-my-personal-style.html)
- [The Pampered Life of a Fashion Supershopper](https://www.thecut.com/article/luxury-fashion-brands-very-important-clients-vic.html)
- [Escaping With PinkPantheress](https://www.thecut.com/article/pinkpantheresss-tiktok-dance-pop-music-heaven-knows-interview.html)
1. [Your Daily Horoscope by Madame Clairevoyant: September 23, 2024](https://www.thecut.com/article/your-daily-horoscope-madame-clairevoyant-sept-23-2024.html)
2. [Real Aging Is Scarier Than *The Substance*](https://www.thecut.com/article/review-the-substance-movie-gets-aging-wrong.html)
3. [Why Was Travis Kelce Looking So Sad Last Night?](https://www.thecut.com/article/travis-kelce-sad-chiefs-game-taylor-swift-absent.html)
4. [Everything We Know About Diddy’s Alleged ‘Freak Offs’](https://www.thecut.com/article/diddy-indictment-explained-baby-oil-drugs-freak-offs.html)
5. [All of the Allegations Against Diddy](https://www.thecut.com/article/diddy-allegations-sexual-abuse-cassie.html)
1. [Everything We Know About Diddy’s Alleged ‘Freak Offs’](https://www.thecut.com/article/diddy-indictment-explained-baby-oil-drugs-freak-offs.html)
2. [All of the Allegations Against Diddy](https://www.thecut.com/article/diddy-allegations-sexual-abuse-cassie.html)
3. [Real Aging Is Scarier Than *The Substance*](https://www.thecut.com/article/review-the-substance-movie-gets-aging-wrong.html)
4. [Why Was Travis Kelce Looking So Sad Last Night?](https://www.thecut.com/article/travis-kelce-sad-chiefs-game-taylor-swift-absent.html)
5. [Miranda July Knows That Desire Means Feeling Alive](https://www.thecut.com/article/esther-perel-calling-miranda-july-discuss-all-fours.html)
1. [Your Daily Horoscope by Madame Clairevoyant: September 23, 2024](https://www.thecut.com/article/your-daily-horoscope-madame-clairevoyant-sept-23-2024.html)
2. [Real Aging Is Scarier Than *The Substance*](https://www.thecut.com/article/review-the-substance-movie-gets-aging-wrong.html)
3. [Why Was Travis Kelce Looking So Sad Last Night?](https://www.thecut.com/article/travis-kelce-sad-chiefs-game-taylor-swift-absent.html)
4. [Everything We Know About Diddy’s Alleged ‘Freak Offs’](https://www.thecut.com/article/diddy-indictment-explained-baby-oil-drugs-freak-offs.html)
5. [All of the Allegations Against Diddy](https://www.thecut.com/article/diddy-allegations-sexual-abuse-cassie.html)
1. [Everything We Know About Diddy’s Alleged ‘Freak Offs’](https://www.thecut.com/article/diddy-indictment-explained-baby-oil-drugs-freak-offs.html)
2. [All of the Allegations Against Diddy](https://www.thecut.com/article/diddy-allegations-sexual-abuse-cassie.html)
3. [Real Aging Is Scarier Than *The Substance*](https://www.thecut.com/article/review-the-substance-movie-gets-aging-wrong.html)
4. [Why Was Travis Kelce Looking So Sad Last Night?](https://www.thecut.com/article/travis-kelce-sad-chiefs-game-taylor-swift-absent.html)
5. [Miranda July Knows That Desire Means Feeling Alive](https://www.thecut.com/article/esther-perel-calling-miranda-july-discuss-all-fours.html)
A photograph of German soldiers at the entrance to the Richelieu Drouot metro station in Paris, taken on July 14, 1940. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
A photograph of German soldiers at the entrance to the Richelieu Drouot metro station in Paris, taken on July 14, 1940. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
PARIS — The search for the unknown photographer began in the summer of 2020, with the discovery of an old photo album at a flea market in the town of Barjac, in the south of France.
PARIS — The search for the unknown photographer began in the summer of 2020, with the discovery of an old photo album at a flea market in the town of Barjac, in the south of France.
@ -50,11 +47,7 @@ Inside the album were 377 black-and-white photos taken between 1940 and 1942. Th
A photograph of the families of prisoners from the La Celle-Saint-Cloud detention camp, outside Paris, taken on July 28, 1940. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
A photograph of the families of prisoners from the La Celle-Saint-Cloud detention camp, outside Paris, taken on July 28, 1940. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
But there was no indication of who had taken the pictures, and with good reason.
But there was no indication of who had taken the pictures, and with good reason.
@ -68,19 +61,11 @@ Together, they embarked on a four-year search for the unknown photographer.
A photograph of Paris' Le Meurice hotel in Rue de Rivoli flanked by the flags of Nazi Germany. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
A photograph of Paris' Le Meurice hotel in Rue de Rivoli flanked by the flags of Nazi Germany. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
German soldiers at the Pantin market stand. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
German soldiers at the Pantin market stand. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
Adding to the intrigue were the captions on the back of the photos, written in block letters as if someone were trying to mask their handwriting. Not only was the location, date and exact time of day noted, but there was also often a snarky caption about the German soldiers, whom the photographer referred to, pejoratively, as "Fritzes."
Adding to the intrigue were the captions on the back of the photos, written in block letters as if someone were trying to mask their handwriting. Not only was the location, date and exact time of day noted, but there was also often a snarky caption about the German soldiers, whom the photographer referred to, pejoratively, as "Fritzes."
@ -98,11 +83,7 @@ One collection was at the Museum of National Resistance, outside Paris. The imag
German soldiers on the Trocadéro esplanade, facing the Eiffel Tower. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
German soldiers on the Trocadéro esplanade, facing the Eiffel Tower. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
Again, however, there was no indication of who the photographer was.
Again, however, there was no indication of who the photographer was.
@ -112,11 +93,7 @@ But he had no idea who had taken them either.
Philippe Broussard, an investigative journalist with French newspaper *Le Monde*. **Eleanor Beardsley/NPR******hide caption****
Philippe Broussard, an investigative journalist with French newspaper *Le Monde*. **Eleanor Beardsley/NPR**
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Eleanor Beardsley/NPR
As the investigation dragged into its fourth year, Broussard says he felt like a cop confronting a cold case: both discouraged and obsessed.
As the investigation dragged into its fourth year, Broussard says he felt like a cop confronting a cold case: both discouraged and obsessed.
@ -132,19 +109,11 @@ Broussard couldn't believe it.
A photograph of Vernon, France, in ruins following German bombings, taken on Sept. 15, 1940. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
A photograph of Vernon, France, in ruins following German bombings, taken on Sept. 15, 1940. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
A group of civilians and German soldiers visits the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
A group of civilians and German soldiers visits the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
"So on that famous Friday, April 12, I will remember all my life, I discovered the name of the man who took the photos," says Broussard. "His name was Raoul Minot, and he was an employee of Le Printemps. He was not a professional photographer, but someone who decided to take his own camera and to go in the streets of Paris and to take as many pictures as possible."
"So on that famous Friday, April 12, I will remember all my life, I discovered the name of the man who took the photos," says Broussard. "His name was Raoul Minot, and he was an employee of Le Printemps. He was not a professional photographer, but someone who decided to take his own camera and to go in the streets of Paris and to take as many pictures as possible."
@ -154,11 +123,7 @@ Broussard says he believes this was all much more than a hobby.
A photograph showing French prisoners carrying out forced labor in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, as a German soldier with a bayonet walks toward them, taken July 28, 1940. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
A photograph showing French prisoners carrying out forced labor in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, as a German soldier with a bayonet walks toward them, taken July 28, 1940. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
"There was a small group of people who worked together and knew there was a kind of resistance through the pictures," he says.
"There was a small group of people who worked together and knew there was a kind of resistance through the pictures," he says.
@ -180,11 +145,7 @@ Broussard says this is more than just a story about about one man taking picture
At Place de la Concorde, a German soldier in uniform stands alongside a woman, as the photographer casts a shadow on the ground behind them. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle******hide caption****
At Place de la Concorde, a German soldier in uniform stands alongside a woman, as the photographer casts a shadow on the ground behind them. **From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle**
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From the private collection of Stéphanie Colaux andStéphane Jaegle
"It's the story of a normal man who tried to fight, even if he was in front of the biggest army of that time, in front of colleagues who could be traitors," he says. "It's the story of courage, of the love of his wife who wanted to know what happened to him. So it's a universal story."
"It's the story of a normal man who tried to fight, even if he was in front of the biggest army of that time, in front of colleagues who could be traitors," he says. "It's the story of courage, of the love of his wife who wanted to know what happened to him. So it's a universal story."
@ -196,11 +157,7 @@ It was a quest that also led to the discovery of another photo — Minot's own.
An image of part of a document containing a photo of Raoul Minot from the French Ministry of Deported Prisoners and Refugees. **France's Service Historique de la Défense******hide caption****
An image of part of a document containing a photo of Raoul Minot from the French Ministry of Deported Prisoners and Refugees. **France's Service Historique de la Défense**
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France's Service Historique de la Défense
The ID shot was found with the help of a reader of Broussard's articles in *Le Monde*. It was on a document from France's postwar Ministry for Deported Prisoners and Refugees, and it sketched out the final steps in Minot's life: deportation to Buchenwald, Germany — the site of a Nazi concentration camp — and, after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, a forced "death march" to Eastern Europe, which he somehow survived, before dying in a U.S. military hospital in Cham, Germany.
The ID shot was found with the help of a reader of Broussard's articles in *Le Monde*. It was on a document from France's postwar Ministry for Deported Prisoners and Refugees, and it sketched out the final steps in Minot's life: deportation to Buchenwald, Germany — the site of a Nazi concentration camp — and, after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, a forced "death march" to Eastern Europe, which he somehow survived, before dying in a U.S. military hospital in Cham, Germany.
@ -42,12 +42,8 @@ For many New Yorkers, the rings are a reminder of the close relationship between
In a court filing earlier this year, Giuliani listed the rings alongside a series of watches and other jewelry that he valued at $30,000 total. In response, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said in a filing that Giuliani had assigned “egregiously low values to his assets, including Yankee World Series rings,” according to *[Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/rudy-giuliani-bankruptcy-court-creditors-ruby-freeman-donald-trump-1923906)*. [Ken Goldin](https://www.sportico.com/t/ken-goldin/), founder of Goldin Auctions, said in an email that the four rings combined would likely be worth a combined $200,000 in a collectibles auction. That’s “a significant premium” over what they would fetch if they were previously owned by a lesser-known Yankees employee, he said.
In a court filing earlier this year, Giuliani listed the rings alongside a series of watches and other jewelry that he valued at $30,000 total. In response, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said in a filing that Giuliani had assigned “egregiously low values to his assets, including Yankee World Series rings,” according to *[Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/rudy-giuliani-bankruptcy-court-creditors-ruby-freeman-donald-trump-1923906)*. [Ken Goldin](https://www.sportico.com/t/ken-goldin/), founder of Goldin Auctions, said in an email that the four rings combined would likely be worth a combined $200,000 in a collectibles auction. That’s “a significant premium” over what they would fetch if they were previously owned by a lesser-known Yankees employee, he said.
The rings themselves have a long and somewhat murky history. A [2007 story](https://www.villagevoice.com/the-yankees-clean-up-man/) in the *Village Voice* titled “The Yankees’ Clean-Up Man” looked into how and when Giuliani got them—questions that matter more than some fans might initially think. New York officials are prohibited by law from receiving gifts of significant monetary value from anyone doing business with the city. The Yankees, of course, do significant business with the city, and Giuliani never reported the rings as gifts with the city’s Conflict of Interest Board.
The rings themselves have a long and somewhat murky history. A [2007 story](https://www.villagevoice.com/the-yankees-clean-up-man/) in the *Village Voice* titled “The Yankees’ Clean-Up Man” looked into how and when Giuliani got them—questions that matter more than some fans might initially think. New York officials are prohibited by law from receiving gifts of significant monetary value from anyone doing business with the city. The Yankees, of course, do significant business with the city, and Giuliani never reported the rings as gifts with the city’s Conflict of Interest Board.
A representative for the MLB team told the newspaper that Giuliani paid $16,000 *total* for them—$13,500 for the 1998, 1999 and 2000 rings paid in 2003, and $2,500 for his 1996 ring paid in 2004. All of those payments were after he left office, and the rep told the newspaper that it could be “reasonably deduced” that he didn’t receive the rings until then. Other sources, however, told the paper that he received the 1996 ring years earlier—in 1996 or 1997—while he was still in office. Each of those payments, regardless of timing, would have been well below the market value of the rings themselves, let alone the resale value of the items as collectibles.
A representative for the MLB team told the newspaper that Giuliani paid $16,000 *total* for them—$13,500 for the 1998, 1999 and 2000 rings paid in 2003, and $2,500 for his 1996 ring paid in 2004. All of those payments were after he left office, and the rep told the newspaper that it could be “reasonably deduced” that he didn’t receive the rings until then. Other sources, however, told the paper that he received the 1996 ring years earlier—in 1996 or 1997—while he was still in office. Each of those payments, regardless of timing, would have been well below the market value of the rings themselves, let alone the resale value of the items as collectibles.
# The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated: How Drillers Offload Costly Cleanup Onto the Public
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. [Sign up for Dispatches](https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/dispatches?source=www.propublica.org&placement=top-note®ion=local), a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
In December 1990, officials in the federal agency tasked with regulating offshore oil and gas drilling received [a memo with a dire warning](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25453372-1990-memo/): America faced a ticking time bomb of environmental liability from unplugged oil and gas wells, wrote the agency’s chief of staff. Those wells and their costly cleanup obligations were being concentrated in the hands of cash-strapped drillers at the same time as production was shrinking. (The document, unearthed by public interest watchdog organization Documented, was shared with ProPublica and Capital & Main.)
More than three decades later, little action has been taken to heed that warning, and the time bomb is threatening to explode.
#### Good journalism makes a difference:
Our nonprofit, independent newsroom has one job: to hold the powerful to account. Here’s how our investigations are [spurring real world change:](https://www.propublica.org/impact)
The Supreme Court created its [first-ever code of conduct](https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-adopts-ethics-code-scotus-thomas-alito-crow) after we reported that justices repeatedly failed to disclose gifts and travel from the ultrawealthy.
We’re trying something new. [Was it helpful?](https://iteratehq.com/propublica/670eabefffb484af7dc7db86)
More than 2 million oil and gas wells sit unplugged across the country. Many leak contaminants like brine, methane and benzene into waterways, farmland and neighborhoods. The industry has already left hundreds of thousands of old wells as orphans, meaning companies walked away, leaving taxpayers, government agencies or other drillers on the hook for cleanup.
America’s oil fields are increasingly split between a small number of wells producing record profits and everything else. Researchers estimate roughly 90% of wells are already dead or barely producing.
Consider the Permian Basin, the world’s most productive oil field, stretching from West Texas across southeastern New Mexico.
“The Permian is the oil patch’s Alamo — that’s where it’s retreating to,” Regan Boychuk, a Canadian oil cleanup researcher, said of the oil industry. “That’s their last stand.”
Even here, [many wells sit idle and in disrepair](https://www.propublica.org/series/unplugged). It’s time to plug them, according to a growing chorus of researchers, environmentalists and industry representatives.
The question of who pays for cleanup remains unanswered. Time and again, oil companies have offloaded their oldest wells. Their tactics are not written down in one place or peddled by a single law firm — but companies follow an unmistakable pattern. The strategy, which is legal if followed properly, has become such a tried-and-true endeavor that researchers and environmentalists dubbed it “the playbook.”
Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst with clean-energy-focused think tank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, studies fossil fuel companies’ cleanup costs. “There’s almost a cheerleading squad for shedding your liabilities, like a snake sheds its skin and just slithers away,” he said.
Should you want to become an oil executive and try this strategy yourself, here’s how it works …
As you launch your business, begin by collecting subsidies, [tax breaks](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22102024/oil-company-government-payment-disclosures/) and other incentives from the government to guarantee you can pump oil and gas profitably. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies total in the trillions each year, [according to organizations such as the International Monetary Fund](https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel-subsidies-surged-to-record-7-trillion).
As you set up your business, create layers of shell companies. Down the road, they’ll provide a firewall between you and your liabilities — key among them, cleanup costs.
Once oil and gas production slows, sell low-producing wells. Smaller drillers operating on thinner margins, known in the business as “scavenger companies,” will be happy to take them off your hands.
Rinse and repeat by selling wells as their profits slow to a trickle. They’ll be sold again to ever-smaller companies that teeter on the edge of insolvency. Maintenance and environmental stewardship will usually fall by the wayside as companies eke out a profit. Studies show that [the number of environmental violations rises](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ad75f0) as wells pass to less-capitalized drillers. But these wells aren’t your problem any longer.
Then, idle the wells — pausing production, but not plugging them or cleaning up — and walk away. Regulators are typically tasked with ensuring that as much oil as possible is pumped out of the ground, so rules allow wells to sit idle, instead of being plugged, in case prices surge and it becomes profitable to restart them. However, [a study in California found that](https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-oil-well-drilling-idle-cleanup/), after wells are inactive for only 10 months, there’s a 50-50 chance they will never produce again.
Regulators will likely grow tired of asking you to clean up your wells, but you can make the case for leaving them unplugged for now. Pitch grand plans, as other drillers have — maybe [repurposing the wells for bitcoin mining](https://penncapital-star.com/energy-environment/in-rural-pennsylvania-crypto-mining-offers-a-lifeline-for-dying-gas-wells/), [carbon sequestration](https://undark.org/2024/03/26/carbon-storage-abandoned-wells/) or [the synthesis of hydrogen fuel](https://www.alicat.com/support/gold-hydrogen/) — that require the wells to remain open.
When regulators’ patience has reached its limit, remind them what will happen if they come down hard on you. Fines or other extra costs could force your business into bankruptcy, leaving your unplugged wells as orphans and taxpayers on the hook. Ask them if they want to be responsible for that catastrophe.
“The root of the problem is there’s no regulator of the oil industry across North America,” Boychuk said, adding that “the rule of law has never applied to oil and gas.”
When regulators finally act, declare bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Code is meant to protect businesspeople like you who took risks. More than 250 oil and gas operators in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, [according to law firm Haynes Boone](https://www.haynesboone.com/-/media/project/haynesboone/haynesboone/pdfs/energy_bankruptcy_reports/oil_patch_bankruptcy_monitor.pdf?rev=e57d3129b7504ea190df5d33dbacae44&hash=F461E4FE13446BE821B8AE9080C349E6). ([Industry groups estimate](https://www.ipaa.org/independent-producers/) there are several thousand oil companies in the country.)
Regulators only require oil and gas companies to set aside tiny bonds that act like a security deposit on an apartment. Because you didn’t clean up your wells, you’ll lose that money, but it’s a fraction of the profits you’ve banked or the cost of the cleanup work. ProPublica and Capital & Main found that [bonds typically equal less than 2% of actual cleanup costs](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-rising-cost-of-the-oil-industrys-slow-death).
And as you finalize your exit, the labyrinth of shell corporations you set up should act as corporate law intends, protecting you from future responsibility. Such companies, little more than stacks of paper, will be responsible for your liabilities, not you. Even if regulators know who is behind a company, it becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate each layer of a business to go after individual executives.
“It’s the essence of corporate law,” Williams-Derry said.
Now that you’ve offloaded your wells, you’re free to start fresh — launch a new oil company and buy some of your old wells for pennies on the dollar, [a proven option](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-rising-cost-of-the-oil-industrys-slow-death). Maybe you leave oil entirely — [that’s also tried-and-true](https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-oil-cleanup). Or become a vintner and open a winery just down the road from the wells you left as orphans — [you wouldn’t be the first](https://www.desertsun.com/in-depth/news/environment/2021/06/25/oil-bankruptcies-leave-environment-cleanup-california-taxpayers/4977647001/).
For its part, the oil industry downplays the so-called playbook and the country’s orphan well epidemic. “There’s a general trend, which is there are very few orphan wells,” said Kathleen Sgamma, who has been among oil companies’ most vocal proponents as president of the Western Energy Alliance, an industry trade group. Plus, she said, companies’ bonds and states’ orphan well funds help pay for plugging.
But those tasked with addressing the reality of the country’s orphan wells disagree. “We have a welfare system for oil and gas. I hope you understand that,” said New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, who oversees the state’s public lands. New Mexico has already documented more than 1,700 orphan wells across the state. “We have oil and gas welfare queens.”
In New Mexico, Garcia Richard is trying to hold accountable one of the myriad drillers that have followed key steps in the playbook, the oil company known as Siana.
Siana is made up of two related entities — Siana Oil and Gas Co. LLC and Siana Operating LLC — based in Midland and Conroe, Texas. The company operated 11 wells in southeastern New Mexico in the heart of the Permian Basin.
In reality, Siana is the corporate shield for a man named Tom Ragsdale. After he aggregated his few wells, he generated cash through a trickle of oil and gas production and set up a business injecting other companies’ wastewater into his wells to dispose of it. But the state worried that Ragsdale’s operations were polluting the environment and that he was refusing to pay royalties and rental fees he owed the state, according to State Land Office staff.
Ragsdale did not respond to repeated requests for comment from ProPublica and Capital & Main. He also did not appear for a pretrial conference [after the state brought legal action against Siana](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25444494-2016-04-27-complaint-for-damages/), [court records show](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25141647-2020-09-01-judgment/?q=appear+and+meaningfully&mode=document#document/p2), and a state court judge ruled against his companies.
Siana was responsible for at least 16 spills, [according to New Mexico Oil Conservation Division data](https://wwwapps.emnrd.nm.gov/OCD/OCDPermitting/Data/Spills/SpillSearchResults.aspx?IncidentIdSearchClause=BeginsWith&Severity=All&Ogrid_Name=siana&OperatorSearchClause=BeginsWith&FacilityIdSearchClause=BeginsWith&FacilityNameSearchClause=BeginsWith&WellNameSearchClause=BeginsWith&Section=00), mainly spilling what’s called produced water, a briny wastewater that comes to the surface alongside oil and gas. “Corrosion” and “Equipment Failure” were among the causes.
The State Land Office hired an engineering firm to study the damage. The firm produced [a damning 201-page report in 2018](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25141650-2018-07-05-siana-tank-battery-and-swd-well-site-contamination-report-rev), finding oil and salt contamination exceeding state limits at Siana’s most polluted site. At high enough levels, these substances can kill plants, harm wildlife and impact human health.
The State Land Office estimated that cleaning up that site alone would cost about $1 million.
In 2020, New Mexico [won a judgment against Ragsdale’s companies](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25141647-2020-09-01-judgment) that, with interest, is now worth more than $3.5 million. But it won’t cover the cleanup cost. Between a small bond and the judgment, the state has been able to recover a mere $50,000 or so from Siana and related entities.
When the state tried to collect the rest, Ragsdale placed Siana Oil and Gas [in bankruptcy protection in June 2023](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25141648-siana-oil-gas-initial-bankruptcy-filing/). Although he listed the company as having millions in assets at the time of the bankruptcy, the company had only $20,500 in a bank account. [Court records](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25141649-siana-bankruptcy-form-202) show Siana is responsible for between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities, including money owed to the state of New Mexico, other oil companies, various counties and others.
Stickers plastered around Siana’s drill sites — on which the company’s name is misspelled — provide phone numbers to call in case of leaks or other emergencies. None went to Ragsdale or Siana employees. A man named William Dean answered one number. He owned a local oil field services company called Dean’s Pumping that was contracted to work on Siana’s wells, but Ragsdale stopped paying its bills, ultimately owing his company tens of thousands of dollars, Dean said.
“He was trying to half-ass things,” Dean said of Ragsdale. “I don’t know what happened to Tom.”
Siana’s bankruptcy case is ongoing, but Ragsdale has been largely unresponsive even in those proceedings.
Siana is, Garcia Richard said, “an exemplar of how our system has failed.” Although he was very nearly free of his old wells, Ragsdale flouted the playbook and ignored the bankruptcy judge’s demands that he participate in the case. In an unusual move, the judge in late September [issued a warrant for Ragsdale’s arrest](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25178834-arrest-warrant) to compel him to hand over certain data. The U.S. Marshals Service was investigating Ragsdale’s whereabouts but had not taken him into custody as of mid-December, according to an agency representative.
The day after the judge issued the arrest warrant, [the bankruptcy trustee filed a complaint](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25178835-rubico-ventures-complaint) alleging Ragsdale had committed fraud, siphoning about $2.4 million from Siana to purchase real estate in Houston.
That money could have gone toward cleaning up the mess left to New Mexico taxpayers.
ProPublica and Capital & Main visited Siana’s 11 wells in late 2023. At one drill site, methane leaked from a wellhead that had also stained the surrounding land black from spilled oil. The air was sour with the smell of toxic hydrogen sulfide. A nearby tank that held oil for processing was rusted through. Another had leaked an unidentified liquid. There appeared to be hoofprints where cattle had tracked through the polluted mud.
ProPublica and Capital & Main found oil spills at multiple Siana wells. At others, the idle pump jacks stood silent — corroded skeletons at the end of the line, the detritus of another run through the playbook.
Efforts to reform the system that has shielded oil companies from liability have been haphazard. When the federal government rewrote its rule setting bond levels on federal public land earlier this year, [a simple math error](https://www.propublica.org/article/oil-companies-must-set-aside-more-money-to-plug-wells-a-new-rule-says-but-it-wont-be-enough) meant the government would ask oil companies to set aside around $400 million less in bonds than it would’ve otherwise. And when states have tried to pass reforms, they’ve been stymied by [state legislators’ and regulators’ chummy relationships with the industry](https://www.propublica.org/article/oil-industry-lobbying-unplugged-wells).
As an ever-greater share of wells go offline and the economy transitions to cleaner forms of energy, policymakers face a choice: Do they focus attention on propping up or cleaning up the industry?
Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance gives voice to one path forward. “Any time a well goes into an orphan status, it’s not a good thing,” Sgamma said, yet her group has been instrumental in killing efforts to address the orphan well epidemic and the oil industry’s contributions to climate change. Her organization [is suing to halt the federal rule](https://www.reuters.com/legal/oil-gas-groups-sue-block-us-rule-raising-drilling-fees-public-lands-2024-05-16/) that sought to bring bonding levels closer to true plugging costs.
[Sgamma co-authored](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/project-2025-trump-blueprint-public-lands_n_660f001fe4b083254eab6ba5) the energy section of Project 2025, [the conservative policy paper with deep ties to the first Trump administration](https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-election-federal-agencies) that lays out policy priorities for a conservative White House. The plan would “Stop the war on oil and natural gas,” reopen undeveloped habitat from Alaska to Colorado for drilling, increase the number of sales for oil leases on public lands and shrink federal environmental agencies. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly indicated this closely aligns with his vision for pumping America’s “liquid gold.” He has begun staffing his administration with pro-oil and gas figures.
The future for which Sgamma is fighting sees a resilient American oil and gas industry, able to “take a lot of punches” while continuing to grow unabated.
Or there’s the future Garcia Richard, who oversees New Mexico’s public land, envisions. She has [paused the leasing of public land](https://apnews.com/article/new-mexico-halts-some-oillease-sales-5ad94d5d7f43fb593417da2ebf0080a0) to drillers until the Legislature forces oil companies to pay state taxpayers higher royalties that reflect fair market rates. She directed her staff to aggressively pursue companies like Siana. And her office is preparing to raise required bonding levels. As she talked about this work, she held up the literal rubber stamp that imparts the State Land Office’s seal on documents, suggesting that’s not how business is done anymore. She also held up a small notebook where she tracks the numerous companies her office is pursuing for polluting the state’s land and water.
In her future, Garcia Richard said, oil drillers wouldn’t behave like Siana and Ragsdale. “A good-acting company is a company that understands there’s a cost of doing business that shouldn’t be borne by the landowner, shouldn’t be borne by the taxpayers,” she said. But in the modern American oil industry, she added, the playbook and the still-burning fuse of the cleanup time bomb represent little more than “Wild West behavior.”
###### [Listen to an audio version of this article.](https://audm.herokuapp.com/player-embed/?pub=harpers&articleID=ghosts-machine-pelly)
I first heard about ghost artists in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was new to the music-streaming beat. I had been researching the influence of major labels on Spotify playlists since the previous year, and my first report had just been published. Within a few days, the owner of an independent record label in New York dropped me a line to let me know about a mysterious phenomenon that was “in the air” and of growing concern to those in the indie music scene: Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts. Some even speculated that Spotify might be making the tracks itself. At a time when playlists created by the company were becoming crucial sources of revenue for independent artists and labels, this was a troubling allegation.
At first, it sounded to me like a conspiracy theory. Surely, I thought, these artists were just DIY hustlers trying to game the system. But the tips kept coming. Over the next few months, I received more notes from readers, musicians, and label owners about the so-called fake-artist issue than about anything else. One digital strategist at an independent record label worried that the problem could soon grow more insidious. “So far it’s happening within a genre that mostly affects artists at labels like the one I work for, or Kranky, or Constellation,” the strategist said, referring to two long-running indie labels.\* “But I doubt that it’ll be unique to our corner of the music world for long.”
By July, the story had burst into public view, after a *Vulture* article resurfaced a year-old item from the trade press claiming that Spotify was filling some of its popular and relaxing mood playlists—such as those for “jazz,” “chill,” and “peaceful piano” music—with cheap fake-artist offerings created by the company. A Spotify spokesperson, in turn, told the music press that these reports were “categorically untrue, full stop”: the company was not creating its own fake-artist tracks. But while Spotify may not have created them, it stopped short of denying that it had added them to its playlists. The spokesperson’s rebuttal only stoked the interest of the media, and by the end of the summer, articles on the matter appeared from NPR and the *Guardian,* among other outlets. Journalists scrutinized the music of some of the artists they suspected to be fake and speculated about how they had become so popular on Spotify. Before the year was out, the music writer David Turner had used analytics data to illustrate how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content.
For years, I referred to the names that would pop up on these playlists simply as “mystery viral artists.” Such artists often had millions of streams on Spotify and pride of place on the company’s own mood-themed playlists, which were compiled by a team of in-house curators. And they often had Spotify’s verified-artist badge. But they were clearly fake. Their “labels” were frequently listed as stock-music companies like Epidemic, and their profiles included generic, possibly AI-generated imagery, often with no artist biographies or links to websites. Google searches came up empty.
In the years following that initial salvo of negative press, other controversies served as useful distractions for Spotify: the company’s 2019 move into podcasting and eventual $250million deal with Joe Rogan, for example, and its 2020 introduction of Discovery Mode, a program through which musicians or labels accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for algorithmic promotion. The fake-artist saga faded into the background, another of Spotify’s unresolved scandals as the company increasingly came under fire and musicians grew more emboldened to speak out against it with each passing year.
Then, in 2022, an investigation by the Swedish daily *Dagens Nyheter* revived the allegations. By comparing streaming data against documents retrieved from the Swedish copyright collection society STIM, the newspaper revealed that around twenty songwriters were behind the work of more than five hundred “artists,” and that thousands of their tracks were on Spotify and had been streamed millions of times.
Around this time, I decided to dig into the story of Spotify’s ghost artists in earnest, and the following summer, I made a visit to the *DN* offices in Sweden. The paper’s technology editor, Linus Larsson, showed me the Spotify page of an artist called Ekfat. Since 2019, a handful of tracks had been released under this moniker, mostly via the stock-music company Firefly Entertainment, and appeared on official Spotify playlists like “Lo-Fi House” and “Chill Instrumental Beats.” One of the tracks had more than three million streams; at the time of this writing, the number has surpassed four million. Larsson was amused by the elaborate artist bio, which he read aloud. It described Ekfat as a classically trained Icelandic beat maker who graduated from the “Reykjavik music conservatory,” joined the “legendary Smekkleysa Lo-Fi Rockers crew” in 2017, and released music only on limited-edition cassettes until 2019. “Completely made up,” Larsson said. “This is probably the most absurd example, because they really tried to make him into the coolest music producer that you can find.”
Besides the journalists at *DN,* no one in Sweden wanted to talk about the fake artists. In Stockholm, I visited the address listed for one of the ghost labels and knocked on the door—no luck. I met someone who knew a guy who maybe ran one of the production companies, but he didn’t want to talk. A local businessman would reveal only that he worked in the “functional music space,” and clammed up as soon as I told him about my investigation.
Even with the new reporting, there was still much missing from the bigger picture: Why, exactly, were the tracks getting added to these hugely popular Spotify playlists? We knew that the ghost artists were linked to certain production companies, and that those companies were pumping out an exorbitant number of tracks, but what was their relationship to Spotify?
For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
How had it come to this? Spotify, after all, did not start out aiming to shape users’ listening behavior. In fact, in the early days, the user’s experience on the platform centered on the search bar. Listeners needed to know what they were looking for. The company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, is said to have been averse to the idea of an overly curated service. When the platform launched in Europe, in 2008, it positioned itself as a way to access music that was “better than piracy,” like a fully stocked iTunes library but accessed over the internet, all of it available via a monthly subscription. The emphasis was on providing entry to “A World of Music,” as an early ad campaign emphasized, with the tagline “Instant, simple and free.” Users could make their own playlists or listen to those made by others.
Like many other tech companies in the twenty-first century, Spotify spent its first decade claiming to disrupt an archaic industry, scaling up as quickly as possible, and attracting venture capitalists to an unproven business model. In its search for growth and profitability, Spotify reinvented itself repeatedly: as a social-networking platform in 2010, as an app marketplace in 2011, and by the end of 2012, as a hub for what it called “music for every moment,” supplying recommendations for specific moods, activities, and times of day. Spotify made its move into curation the next year, hiring a staff of editors to compile in-house playlists. In 2014, the company was increasing its investment in algorithmic personalization technology. This innovation was intended, as Spotify put it, to “level the playing field” for artists by minimizing the power of major labels, radio stations, and other old-school gatekeepers; in their place, it claimed, would be a system that simply rewarded tracks that streamed well. By the mid-2010s, the service was actively recasting itself as a neutral platform, a data-driven meritocracy that was rewriting the rules of the music business with its playlists and algorithms.
In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major labels, the rise of Spotify would soon pay off. By the mid-2010s, streaming had cemented itself as the most important source of revenue for the majors, which were raking in cash from Spotify’s millions of paying subscribers after more than a decade of declining revenue. But while Ek’s company was paying labels and publishers a lot of money—some 70percent of its revenue—it had yet to turn a profit itself, something shareholders would soon demand. In theory, Spotify had any number of options: raising subscription rates, cutting costs by downsizing operations, or finding ways to attract new subscribers.
According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.
After at least a year of piloting, PFC was presented to Spotify editors in 2017 as one of the company’s new bets to achieve profitability. According to a former employee, just a few months later, a new column appeared on the dashboard editors used to monitor internal playlists. The dashboard was where editors could view various stats: plays, likes, skip rates, saves. And now, right at the top of the page, editors could see how successfully each playlist embraced “music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins,” as PFC was described internally.
Editors were soon encouraged by higher-ups, with increasing persistence, to add PFC songs to certain playlists. “Initially, they would give us links to stuff, like, ‘Oh, it’s no pressure for you to add it, but if you can, that would be great,’ ” the former employee recalled. “Then it became more aggressive, like, ‘Oh, this is the style of music in your playlist, if you try it and it works, then why not?’ ”
Another former playlist editor told me that employees were concerned that the company wasn’t being transparent with users about the origin of this material. Still another former editor told me that he didn’t know where the music was coming from, though he was aware that adding it to his playlists was important for the company. “Maybe I should have asked more questions,” he told me, “but I was just kind of like, ‘Okay, how do I mix this music with artists that I like and not have them stand out?’ ”
Some employees felt that those responsible for pushing the PFC strategy did not understand the musical traditions that were being affected by it. These higher-ups were well versed in the business of major-label hitmaking, but not necessarily in the cultures or histories of genres like jazz, classical, ambient, and lo-fi hip-hop—music that tended to do well on playlists for relaxing, sleeping, or focusing. One of my sources told me that the attitude was “if the metrics went up, then let’s just keep replacing more and more, because if the user doesn’t notice, then it’s fine.”
Trying to share concerns about the program internally was challenging. “Some of us really didn’t feel good about what was happening,” a former employee told me. “We didn’t like that it was these two guys that normally write pop songs replacing swaths of artists across the board. It’s just not fair. But it was like trying to stop a train that was already leaving.”
Eventually, it became clear internally that many of the playlist editors—whom Spotify had touted in the press as music lovers with encyclopedic knowledge—were uninterested in participating in the scheme. The company started to bring on editors who seemed less bothered by the PFC model. These new editors looked after mood and activity playlists, and worked on playlists and programs that other editors didn’t want to take part in anymore. (Spotify denies that staffers were encouraged to add PFC to playlists, and that playlist editors were discontented with the program.) By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC. Over 150 of these, including “Ambient Relaxation,” “Deep Focus,” “100% Lounge,” “Bossa Nova Dinner,” “Cocktail Jazz,” “Deep Sleep,” “Morning Stretch,” and “Detox,” were nearly entirely made up of PFC.
Spotify managers defended PFC to staff by claiming that the tracks were being used only for background music, so listeners wouldn’t know the difference, and that there was a low supply of music for these types of playlists anyway. The first part of this argument was true: a statistical breakdown of the PFC rollout, shared over Slack, showed how PFC “streamshare”—Spotify’s term for percentage of total streams—was distributed across playlists for different activities, such as sleep, mindfulness, unwinding, lounging, meditation, calming down, concentrating, or studying. But the other half of management’s justification was harder to prove. Music in instrumental genres such as ambient, classical, electronic, jazz, and lo-fi beats was in plentiful supply across Spotify—more than enough to draw on to populate its playlists without requiring the addition of PFC.
PFC eventually began to be handled by a small team called Strategic Programming, or StraP for short, which in 2023 had ten members. Though Spotify denies that it is trying to increase PFC’s streamshare, internal Slack messages show members of the StraP team analyzing quarter-by-quarter growth and discussing how to increase the number of PFC streams. When *Harper’s Magazine* followed up with the company to ask why internal documents showed the team tracking the percentage of PFC content across hundreds of playlists if not to attend to the growth of PFC content on the platform, a spokesperson for the company said, “Spotify is data driven in all that we do.” And though Spotify told *Harper’s* that it does not “promise placement on any playlists” in any of its licensing agreements, when new PFC providers were brought on board, senior staffers would notify editors to attend to their offerings. “We’ve now onboarded Myndstream,” a StraP staffer wrote in one message. “Please prioritize adding from these as this is a new partner so they can get some live feedback.” That employee shared with the rest of the team a series of lists made by the new partner, sorting their tracks into collections titled “ambient piano covers,” “psilocybin (relax and breathe)” and “lofi originals.” A couple of months later, another team member posted a similar message:
> Our new partner Slumber Group LLC is ready for their first releases. Make sure to have them set up in your Reverb filters for more snoozy content :)
(“Reverb” refers to an internal tool for managing tracks and playlists.)
The roster of PFC providers discussed internally was long. For years, Firefly Entertainment and Epidemic Sound dominated media speculation about Spotify’s playlist practices. But internal messages revealed they were just two among at least a dozen PFC providers, including companies with names like Hush Hush LLC and Catfarm Music AB. There was Queenstreet Content AB, the production company of the Swedish pop songwriting duo Andreas Romdhane and Josef Svedlund, who were also behind another mood-music streaming operation, Audiowell, which partnered with megaproducer Max Martin (who has shaped the sound of global pop music since the Nineties) and private-equity firm Altor. In 2022, the Swedish press reported that Queenstreet was bringing in more than $10million per year. Another provider was Industria Works, a subsidiary of which is Mood Works, a distributor whose website shows that it also streams tracks on Apple Music and Amazon Music. Spotify was perhaps not alone in promoting cheap stock music.
In a Slack channel dedicated to discussing the ethics of streaming, Spotify’s own employees debated the fairness of the PFC program. “I wonder how much these plays ‘steal’ from actual ’normal’ artists,” one employee asked. And yet as far as the public was concerned, the company had gone to great lengths to keep the initiative under wraps. Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music contradicted so many of the ideals upon which its brand had been built. Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music? Artists had been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening. But the PFC program undermined all this. PFC was not the only way in which Spotify deliberately and covertly manipulated programming to favor content that improved its margins, but it was the most immediately galling. Nor was the problem simply a matter of “authenticity” in music. It was a matter of survival for actual artists, of musicians having the ability to earn a living on one of the largest platforms for music. PFC was irrefutable proof that Spotify rigged its system against musicians who knew their worth.
In 2023, on a summer afternoon in Brooklyn, I met up with a jazz musician in a park. We talked about the recent shows we had seen, our favorite and least favorite venues, the respective pockets of the New York music scene we moved through. He spoke passionately about his friends’ music and his most cherished performance spaces. But our conversation soon turned to something else: his most recent side gig, making jazz for a company that was described, in one internal Spotify document, as one of its “high margin (PFC) licensors.”
He wasn’t familiar with the term PFC, but his tracks have been given prominent placement on some of Spotify’s most PFC-saturated chill-jazz playlists. Like many musicians in his position, there was a lot he didn’t know about the arrangement. He had signed a one-year contract to make anonymous tracks for a production company that would distribute them on Spotify. He called it his “Spotify playlist gig,” a commitment he also called “brain-numbing” and “pretty much completely joyless.” And while he didn’t quite understand the details of his employer’s relationship with Spotify, he knew that many of his tracks had landed on playlists with millions of followers. “I just record stuff and submit it, and I’m not really sure what happens from there,” he told me.
As he described it, making new PFC starts with studying old PFC: it’s a feedback loop of playlist fodder imitated over and over again. A typical session starts with a production company sending along links to target playlists as reference points. His task is to then chart out new songs that could stream well on these playlists. “Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.” With the jazz musician’s particular group, the session typically includes a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer. An engineer from the studio will be there, and usually someone from the PFC partner company will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction. The most common feedback: play simpler. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” the musician told me. “The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.”
This wasn’t a scam artist with a master plan to steal prime playlist real estate. He was just someone who, like other working musicians today, was trying to cobble together a living. “There are so many things in music that you treat as grunt work,” he said. “This kind of felt like the same category as wedding gigs or corporate gigs. It’s made very explicit on Spotify that these are background playlists, so it didn’t necessarily strike me as any different from that.... You’re just a piece of the furniture.”
The jazz musician asked me not to identify the name of the company he worked for; he didn’t want to risk losing the gig. Throughout our conversation, though, he repeatedly emphasized his reservations about the system, calling it “shameful”—even without knowledge of the hard details of the program, he understood that his work was creating value for a company, and a system, with little regard for the well-being of independent artists. In general, the musicians working with PFC companies I spoke with were highly critical of the arrangement. One musician who made electronic compositions for Epidemic Sound told me about how “the creative process was more about replicating playlist styles and vibes than looking inward.” Another musician, a professional audio engineer who turned out ambient recordings for a different PFC partner, told me that he stopped making this type of stock music because “it felt unethical, like some kind of money-laundering scheme.”
According to a former Spotify employee, the managers of the PFC program justified its existence internally in part by claiming that the participating musicians were true artists like any other—they had simply chosen to monetize their creative work in a different way. (A Spotify spokesperson confirmed this, pointing out that “music that an artist creates but publishes under a band name or a pseudonym has been popular across mediums for decades.”) But the PFC musicians I spoke to told a different story. They did not consider their work for these companies to be part of their artistic output. One composer I spoke with compared it to the use of soundalikes in the advertising business, when a production company asks an artist to write and record a cheaper version of a popular song.
“It’s kind of like taking a standardized test, where there’s a range of right answers and a far larger range of wrong answers,” the jazz musician said. “It feels like someone is giving you a prompt or a question, and you’re just answering it, whether it’s actually your conviction or not. Nobody I know would ever go into the studio and record music this way.”
All this points to a disconcerting context collapse for musicians—to the way in which being an artist and the business of background music are increasingly entwined, and the distinctions of purpose increasingly blurred. PFC is in some ways similar to production music, audio made in bulk on a work-for-hire basis, which is often fully owned by production companies that make it easily available to license for ads, in-store soundtracks, film scores, and the like. In fact, PFC seems to encompass repurposed production-music catalogues, but it also appears to include work commissioned more directly for mood playlists, as suggested by one the Spotify StraP team’s discussion of an ongoing “wishlist for PFC partners” on Slack.
Production music is booming today thanks to a digital environment in which a growing share of internet traffic comes from video and audio. Generations of YouTube and TikTok influencers strive to avoid the complicated world of sync licensing (short for music synchronization licensing, the process of acquiring rights to play music in the background of audiovisual content) and the possibility of content being removed for copyright violations. Companies like Epidemic Sound purport to solve this problem, claiming to simplify sync licensing by offering a library of pre-cleared, royalty-free production music for a monthly or yearly subscription fee. They also provide in-store music for retail outlets, in the tradition of muzak.
As Epidemic grew, it started to behave like a record label. “Similar to any label, we were doing licenses with DSPs,” one former employee told me, referring to digital service providers such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify. “Epidemic’s content is primarily being made for sync, so it’s primarily non-lyrical. This includes ambient content, lo-fi beats, classical compositions. Things a YouTube creator might put over a landscape video. And this content tends to also do well in playlists such as ‘Deep Focus,’ for example, on Spotify.”
Unsurprisingly, one of the first venture-capital firms to invest in Spotify, Creandum, also invested early in Epidemic. In 2021, Epidemic raised $450million from Blackstone Growth and EQT Growth, increasing the company’s valuation to $1.4billion. It is striking, even now, that these venture capitalists saw so much potential for profit in background music. “This is, at the end of the day, a data business,” the global head of Blackstone Growth said at the time. The Spotify–Epidemic corporate synergies reflect how streaming has flattened differences across music. The industry has contributed to a massive wave of consolidation: different music-adjacent industries and ecosystems that previously operated in isolation all suddenly depend on royalties from the same platforms. And it has led to the blurring of aesthetic boundaries as well. The musician who made tracks for Epidemic Sound and ended up on many PFC-heavy playlists told me that he was required to release the tracks under his real artist name, on his preexisting Spotify page. “My profile on Spotify picked up a lot once my Epidemic compositions found their way onto playlists,” he said. “The sad thing is that rarely results in playlist listeners digging deeper into the artist of a track they hear or like.”
The Epidemic artist explained how each month started with the company presenting a new playlist it had created. “You are then to compose however many tracks you and Epidemic agree on, drawing ‘inspiration’ from said playlist,” he told me. “Ninety-eight percent of the time, these playlists had very little to do with my own artistic vision and vibe but, rather, focused on what Epidemic felt its subscribers were after. So essentially, I was composing bespoke music. This annoyed the fuck out of me.”
But at the end of the day, he said, it was still a paycheck: “I did it because I needed a job real bad and the money was better than any money I could make from even successful indie labels, many of which I worked with,” he told me. “Honestly, I had no idea which tracks I made would end up doing well.... Every track I made for Epidemic was based on their curated playlist.”
While it’s true that the business of sync licensing can be complicated, musicians from the Ivors Academy, a British advocacy organization for songwriters and composers, say that the “frictions” companies like Epidemic seek to smooth out are actually hard-won industry protections. “Simplicity is overrated when it comes to your rights,” Kevin Sargent, a composer of television and film scores, told me. In claiming to “simplify” the mechanics of the background-music industry, Epidemic and its peers have championed a system of flat-fee buyouts. The Epidemic composer I spoke with said that his payments were routinely around $1,700, and that the tracks were purchased by Epidemic as a complete buyout. “They own the master,” he told me. Epidemic’s selling point is that the music is royalty-free for its own subscribers, but it does collect royalties from streaming services; these it splits with artists fifty-fifty. But in the case of the musician I spoke with, the streaming royalty checks from tracks produced for Epidemic Sound were smaller than those for his non-Epidemic tracks, and artists are not entitled to certain other royalties: to refine its exploitative model, Epidemic does not work with artists who belong to performance-rights organizations, the groups that collect royalties for songwriters when their compositions are played on TV or radio, online, or even in public. “It’s essentially a race to the bottom,” the production-music composer Mat Andasun told me.
The musician who made ambient tracks for one of the PFC partner companies told me about power imbalances he experienced on the job. “There was a fee paid up front,” he explained to me. “It was like, ‘We’ll give you a couple hundred bucks. You don’t own the master. We’ll give you a percentage of publishing.’ And it was basically pitched to me that I could do as many of these tracks as I wanted.” In the end, he recorded only a handful of tracks for the company, released under different aliases, and made a couple thousand dollars. The money seemed pretty good at first, since each track took only a few hours. But as a couple of the tracks took off on Spotify, one garnering millions upon millions of streams, he started to see how unfair the deal was in the long term: the tracks were generating far more revenue for Spotify and the ghost label than he would ever see, because he owned no part of the master and none of the publishing rights. “I’m selling my intellectual property for essentially peanuts,” he said.
He quickly succumbed to the feeling that something was wrong with the arrangement. “I’m aware that the master recording is generating much more than I’m getting. Maybe that’s just business, but it’s so related to being able to get that amount of plays. Whoever can actually get you generating that amount of plays, they hold the power,” the musician told me.
“It feels pretty weird,” he continued. “My name is not on it. There’s no credit. There’s not a label on it. It’s really like there’s nothing—no composer information. There’s a layer of smoke screen. They’re not trying to have it be traceable.”
A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.
“I’m sure it’s something that AI could do now, which is kind of scary,” one of the former Spotify playlist editors told me, referring to the potential for AI tools to pump out audio much like the PFC tracks. The PFC partner companies themselves understand this. According to Epidemic Sound’s own public-facing materials, the company already plans to allow its music writers to use AI tools to generate tracks. In its 2023 annual report, Epidemic explained that its ownership of the world’s largest catalogue of “restriction-free” tracks made it “one of the best-positioned” companies to allow creators to harness “AI’s capabilities.” Even as it promoted the role that AI would play in its business, Epidemic emphasized the human nature of its approach. “Our promise to our artists is that technology will never replace them,” read a post on Epidemic’s corporate blog. But the ceaseless churn of quickly generated ghost-artist tracks already seems poised to do just that.
Spotify, for its part, has been open about its willingness to allow AI music on the platform. During a 2023 conference call, Daniel Ek noted that the boom in AI-generated content could be “great culturally” and allow Spotify to “grow engagement and revenue.” That’s an unsurprising position for a company that has long prided itself on its machine-learning systems, which power many of its recommendations, and has framed its product evolution as a story of AI transformation. These automated recommendations are, in part, how Spotify was able to usher in another of its most contentious cost-saving initiatives: Discovery Mode, its payola-like program whereby artists accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for algorithmic promotion. Like the PFC program, tracks enrolled in Discovery Mode are unmarked on Spotify; both schemes allow the service to push discount content to users without their knowledge. Discovery Mode has drawn scrutiny from artists, organizers, and lawmakers, which highlights another reason the company may ultimately prefer the details of its ghost-artist program to remain obscure. After all, protests for higher royalty rates can’t happen if playlists are filled with artists who remain in the shadows.
# ‘Can the Queen sack a PM?’: how Boris Johnson prorogued parliament
When Boris Johnson became prime minister in July 2019 he was determined to prevent anti-Brexit MPs thwarting his efforts to get Brexit done. He vowed to suspend parliament to prevent them.
Johnson made the most controversial decision of his premiership wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, black work shoes and formal socks, his T-shirt damp with sweat. The prime minister had just played tennis in this bizarre get-up on the court at Chevening when he sat down with his senior staff to discuss a plan to prorogue parliament.
Knowledge of the meeting, on Saturday August 10, let alone the plan, had been confined to a small circle of key advisers, now gathered around a large table upstairs, in a room overlooking the lake. Sunlight streamed
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@ -73,73 +69,13 @@ Keeping personal projects in check and on track.
 
 
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@ -56,7 +56,16 @@ Fungal treatment started on [[2024-06-29|29th June]].
 
 
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@ -88,7 +97,10 @@ Fungal treatment started on [[2024-06-29|29th June]].
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iOS
2 weeks ago
