And Spotify doesn’t seem to care.
False Tonk
We have entered the age of music generated by artificial intelligence – and crooks are already manipulating Spotify to make a profit from their lousy product.
As slate A group of rebellious country music fans have reportedly discovered a method that essentially steals streams by inserting AI-generated covers of songs into otherwise legitimate music playlists to reach millions of listeners.
With generic-sounding names like “Highway Outlaws” and “Waterfront Wranglers,” these almost certainly fake bands all followed the same pattern: tens or hundreds of thousands of streams, zero original songs, bios that sounded an awful lot like they were written by ChatGPT, and no social media presence whatsoever.
As one intrepid user wrote on the r/CountryMusic subreddit, this “artist theft scam” was uncovered after one of the forum’s moderators discovered one such band and dug into the depths of “similar” artists who all seemed equally fake.
“When (the moderator) looked at ‘similar’ artists, he discovered a huge collection of identical AI ‘bands’ with enormous monthly (listeners),” wrote u/calibuildr. “They were all on playlists like ‘Summer Country Vibes’ and there is clearly some sort of inauthentic engagement going on here.”
Labeling buddy
To get to the bottom of this bizarre debacle, slate has contacted 11A, a label claiming to represent the apparent imposter bands in question.
A representative for the alleged label, whose domain name has expired and whose Facebook page with 117 followers has been inactive for at least three years, insisted that there were documents proving the involvement of human artists in the design of the covers. However, the spokesperson did not respond to requests for further information.
Strangely, the alleged AI covers disappeared during slateSpotify insists the content was not removed.
“Spotify has no policy against artists who create content using autotune or AI tools, as long as the content does not violate our other policies, including our misleading content policy, which prohibits identity fraud,” a Spotify representative told the site. “In this case, the content was removed by the content providers.”
Obviously this problem is not limited to country covers. As calibuildr said slate“This has been happening for several years, both in ambient music and in electronic music and jazz.” The blog Metal sucks also uncovered similar fraudulent AI interpretations of metalcore songs that seemed to “hijack” legitimate bands in a similar way.
Since Spotify apparently has no problem with AI music, it is now up to the labels of the bands whose works are covered by computers to take them off the internet – or, as in the case of the fake country covers, to the so-called “content providers” to do it themselves.
More about AI music: Major record labels sue music AI startups for copyright infringement
