Strange Fruits has tens of billions of streams... but it's not without controversy. Its 25-year-old founder speaks out.

<p>Some people say the modern music business lacks entrepreneurial new independent record companies. Those people haven&apos;t met Stef Van Vugt.<br/><br/>The 25-year-old Dutchman founded Strange Fruits (now Fruits Music) in 2016 while studying music as an aspiring DJ.<br/><br/>The label-cum-playlist company now has millions of followers on Spotify, where it&apos;s racked up tens of billions of streams. <br/><br/>From Dance Fruits (5.4m followers) to LoFi Fruits (7m followers), Fruits Music&apos;s playlists have become a phenomenon on Spotify – but not without controversy.<br/><br/>For one thing, Fruits Music &apos;buys out&apos; the rights to all its tunes from artists who work with the company (although it does continue to pay through royalties as part of these deals). <br/><br/>In addition, in order to better ride the Spotify algorithm, the lead &apos;artist&apos; name on all of the tracks the company produces is Fruits Music itself (or one of its sub-brands). This creates similarities to the &apos;fake artists&apos; that caused controversy for Spotify a few years back.<br/><br/>And last year, Rolling Stone <a href='https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-sleep-music-playlists-lady-gaga-1223911/'>wrote an exposé </a>of Fruits Music playlists – particularly Rain Fruits Sounds – that are designed to maximize payouts from Spotify (via its &apos;pro rate&apos; royalty model). Rain Fruits Sounds contains over 2,000 &apos;tracks&apos; of rain noises, many of which are just over 30 seconds long. Every time one of those &apos;tracks&apos; gets played, Strange Fruits increases its market share of Spotify&apos;s royalty pool – ultimately ensuring it gets paid more each month, and &apos;real&apos; artists get paid less.<br/><br/>On this MBW Podcast, Music Business Worldwide founder, Tim Ingham, grills Stef Van Vugt on the story of Strange Fruits, accusations that its actions hurt &apos;real&apos; artists, the &apos;gaming&apos; of streaming playlists – and what he thinks about a shift to &apos;user-centric&apos