Lore is everything in music right now. Artists announce their albums through a series of cryptic posts on Instagram, others run secretive finsta accounts like Kendrick Lamar’s @jojoruski or Lorde’s @onionringsworldwide (dedicated to rating onion rings), and Esdeekid’s explosive rise last year was powered as much by what fans didn’t know about him – namely, his face and previous aliases – as what they did. If the online communities dedicated to uncovering Esdeekid’s real identity are anything to go off, people can’t resist a digital scavenger hunt nowadays. And recent years have seen the rise of a distinctly new brand of musical lore-building: the Spotify burner account.

Just the other week, I stumbled on a slowed-down version of Pixy’s “Legacy” (the biggest UK rap single of 2026) on Spotify. The remix has over 40 million streams and is credited to an artist named backfromparadise, whose entire account – short of acknowledging its ownership directly – contains cryptic references to being run by Pixy herself. The account’s artist bio links to a Pixy finsta of the same name, and every one of its uploads is a slowed down version of her other releases – all linking to Pixy as a featured artist.

This is just one of many accounts of its kind, likely run by the artists themselves and surprisingly popular. Fakemink has fakemink archive (980,000 monthly listeners), Lex Amarni has Lex_offline (500,000 monthly listeners) and Yukan has Yukan Archive (98,000 monthly listeners) – all dedicated to uploading leaks, deleted tracks and alternative versions of official releases. Further afield, there’s 1400 Vault, which chronicles old, emo rap uploads from rage rap pioneer Trippie Redd, and is rumoured online to be run by someone in the artist’s camp.

For many of these newer, invariably gen Z artists, burner accounts seem to reflect an acute awareness of the importance of online presentation nowadays. In a recent interview with Lex Amarni, I asked him about his secret profile. After hesitating briefly, he confirmed that he does in fact run the account. “It’s just somewhere to put throwaway [tracks] that I don’t want on my main account,” he tells me. “I’m a perfectionist, so if something [on my profile] doesn’t look right, it hurts me.” 

Fellow UK Ug rapper Yukan shares a similar view. “There was a song, ‘SOS’, that my fans wanted very badly and I didn’t want to upload it myself,” he tells me when I put the question to him on Instagram. “So, my close friend, Dean, did it instead.” Given Yukan’s biggest song is titled “Fake ID”, it’s uncertain whether Dean is actually a real person – but the point stands either way. 

Lex, meanwhile, adds that he also manages two additional, secret artist aliases on Soundcloud. “They get no views but I don’t care,” he explains. “If I’ve made some sad shit, it goes on one of those accounts, if it’s some advanced electronic shit, it goes on another. I wanted people to have a whole new outlook on the music, without the tinge of my releases as Lex. It’s a way to get junk off my laptop.”

In a broader sense, then, these accounts also entrench themselves in a rich tradition of musical archiving. This has been happening as long as records could be bought and collected, but has reached a feverish pitch with today’s internet-native rap scenes like Drain Gang, Opium/rage rap and the UK Ug. Plunging down further into the Spotify burner iceberg, one will eventually encounter a thriving underworld of fan-run archives – thousands of accounts with names like Playuncle Farti, Drain Gang Archive and adixu’s stuff (each boasting streams in the millions) which have taken the role of chronicling music into their own hands. 

Rather than hinting at their connection to a particular artist, these fan accounts seem more concerned with evading Spotify’s automatic copyright detection software. They subtly tweak audio, create fake aliases and change song titles to ensure that their uploads of leaked, invariably rap and EDM tracks don’t get removed (in fact, a telltale sign of an artist-run burner account is that their uploads rarely get deleted). “They kept deleting gems, songs that I loved,” one 2Hollis and Novagang archivist, DecayedWitches, tells me of their motivations for archiving. Another, Opium uploader Joe Worker, meanwhile, says they simply enjoyed the “clout” that came from giving fans what they wanted.

Other accounts, however, like the aforementioned Playuncle Farti and adixu’s stuff, seem to have seedier intentions. Many of these ‘artists’ seemed less interested in speaking to me for this article, having created elaborate paper trails including fake management companies and artist bios to pretend ownership of their uploads. These are burner accounts in the black market sense – using numerous throwaway profiles to supply illicit Opium music to hungry fans, and, presumably, skim off some sweet Spotify royalties in the process. 

While pirating leaks can cause significant problems for an artist when they do actually intend to release the song (in rare cases, the original creator can actually be flagged for copyrighted material when it’s time to distribute the finished music to streaming platforms), when it comes to preserving old, discarded releases online, many artists are more lenient. Last year, Opium rapper Ken Carson posted an Instagram story featuring music from Playuncle Farti, while DecayedWitches says they’ve been personally supported by their idols. “I spoke to a few guys in Novagang,” they tell me. “It was more of a ‘love what you’re doing’ type thing and respect to one another. Just be cool about it, if they ask you to take it down, take it down.” 

"PlayUncle Farti" is crazy 😂
by u/julian477ii in playboicarti

It’s here that we arrive at a deeper force influencing the rise of Spotify burner accounts. Beyond simply a fetishisation of rare recordings, they also seem to capture something fundamental about the way music is consumed and made in the digital age. Written into both Lex and Yukan’s logics for their Spotify alter egos, for instance, is an underlying sense that music deserves to be archived, and that lost media is a crime greater than piracy. 

After all, pretty much all of these artists were once online fans themselves. In Lex’s case, it was scouring the internet for the deep-cut Aphex Twin and Jack Ü records that allowed him to become a virtuosic producer by his early teens. For American EDM-popstar underscores, it was running YouTube fan account 2ndgenbias, which analysed the K-pop music that shaped her maximalist pop aesthetic. These artists owe their entire careers to the digital archivists there came before them and, on some level, it’s only natural for them to keep the tradition going.

I am reminded of this as I speak to archivist DecayedWitches on Instagram. There’s an undeniable reverence with which they describe the niche 2hollis demos they’ve uploaded, and they have since used the moderate online following they’ve built through archiving to launch their own music career. It strikes me that this is simply how today’s digital generation understands music: the internet is both their sacred source of inspiration and their outlet. Perhaps one day, if DecayedWitches’ music takes off, their own digital footprint will become the trophy for the next generation of lore-hunting fans – much like it did for Yukan and underscores. The cycle continues; happy hunting.

When asked about the rise of fan archive accounts, Spotify provided the following response: “Spotify respects intellectual property rights and expects all users of our platform to do the same. We take claims of copyright infringement seriously. When a rights holder or their agent reports content they believe infringes their copyright, we review the claim and take appropriate action, which may include removing the reported content. We also have a repeat infringer policy, meaning accounts responsible for multiple violations may be terminated.”