66 Comments
User's avatar
Sean Murphy's avatar

I hate to recommend it but a class action lawsuit seems worth pursuing on behalf of these artists seems warranted.

Candace Lynn Talmadge's avatar

Why do you hate to recommend a class action lawsuit? That is one the few ways the not so powerful can hold the powerful to account. It's far from perfect but it's what we got, unless you prefer a rope and a hanging posse. And it may come to that.

M Bell's avatar

Class action or not, if they don’t get sued they won’t stop.

Isaac Karns's avatar

King Gizzard and Here We Go Magic have both been victim to this fraud as well. The King Gizzard case was interesting because the songs were actual recreations, lyrics and all, with genAI and attributed to King Lizard Wizard.

In my opinion AI is killing the goose that laid the golden egg across the whole internet. Trying to find something food or recipe related it's impossible to find anything that's not some bullshit AI "blog". I've been burned so many times I don't even consider searching online for recipes anymore and I think the entire internet is going to soon become so cluttered with slop that it'll be more trouble to use than it's worth.

Philip W Hirschi's avatar

Good pt about recipes. In my case, I tend to stick to known recipe sites - NYT, SeriousEats, a few individuals whom I trust. I should probably get back in the habit of using my many, many cookbooks currently gathering dust in the garage.

I Heart Noise's avatar

I agree - Spotify killed the golden goose. Corporate greed is disgusting.

Travis Hartnett's avatar

Spotify is just a rip-off platform, through and through. People need to stop using it. It will never get better.

David Perlmutter's avatar

The fans of the artists will know and complain- they know for sure what they look like. Spotify is run by assholes who won't pay proper licensing fees for music, film or photos...

godzero's avatar

Why is anyone still using Spotify?

Douglas Groothuis's avatar

Never had it, never will!

godzero's avatar

I used it for a while but then quit, never to return.

miasmo's avatar

Who could have predicted that an economic ideology whose premise is that greed is good would produce shitty results?

Douglas Groothuis's avatar

If you mean the free market, that is false. It allows for it, but it can be exposed. Would you rather have a socialist government that controls nearly everything? I would not.

miasmo's avatar

Capitalism "can never be a free market, because the concentration of wealth that it inevitably brings will overflow into the political system and mean that the state will continue to skew the market in favour of big capital." -- Steve Owens

Douglas Groothuis's avatar

It's more free than under socialism. No econcomic system can address greed, but the free market minimizes the damage. Read Adam Smith.

Grant Sachs's avatar

Important work you’re doing Ted, thank you

Roaringgirl55's avatar

I'm canceling my Spotify membership as soon as I finish typing this. Disgusted and outraged.

Darren Hemmings's avatar

At Motive Unknown we have seen this repeatedly now, Ted. We work with an artist, Bicep, who had not one but three counterfeit albums, all released on the same day: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bicep/s/odw3drOb79 And as you'll see, this isn't just Spotify; it's happening on Tidal too.

In their case, they were able to get the songs taken down because they are with a bigger, more powerful distributor that has the means to talk to the DSPs and get the problem addressed. If you are not one of those people, then you fall into the gap of not knowing who to speak to and the problem never getting resolved.

Equally, you have AI agents now working to a level where they can create the music and entirely handle creating an account with a distributor like Ditto and flooding DSPs with their slop. The really perverse thing is that it would appear the CEO of Ditto was the person responsible for the MCP that was allowing this kind of mass upload through their service (based on comments on my own article).

As I wrote about in my own piece the other day, I think there's a fundamental problem with confirming artists as authentic. It's worth taking a look at the platform Genotone - https://genotone.com/ - which is aiming to solve this problem and looks like it has a relatively elegant solution. (And if you fancied reading my piece, that's here - https://networknotesnewsletter.substack.com/p/death-by-a-thousand-bots?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web)

David Rothenberg's avatar

You don't have to be famous to be faked on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0am58B7t8hWDe62l9hsQEP

This album cover looks like something I might use... but it's some rain sounds without any human instruments, and completely AI generated. I contacted Score a Score and they promised to take it down but it still lurks up there....

Chris Dalla Riva's avatar

The problem is at the distribution level. You can pay Distrokid, or a bunch of other services, $20 a year or so to distribute your music to every service. Distributors have no incentive to stop this. And there’s no great detection for streaming services. The best solutions imo are some sort of upload limits through distributors and streaming services locking down certain accounts so they can only publish uploads from certain partners

Sean Gillis's avatar

There's gobs and gobs of slop 'Celtic' slop on Youtube - AI bagpipes, fiddles, whistles, bodhrans, etc. I haven't seen impersonation, but there are artists that sell (sold) in big numbers that might end up targeted.

Sage M's avatar

I suspect that Joe Rogan would love to have you on to discuss this, among other topics. If you're game for that I'd really encourage you to reach out to his people.

Pop Rock Explosion!'s avatar

A good and trustworthy you tube lawyer who is all over this type

Of ai garbage: https://m.youtube.com/topmusicattorney

Greg Gioia's avatar

This is probably a good time to share that my new album by Dr. Dre and Frank Sinatra will be out this week on Spotify. I just got out of the studio with Frank, and we agreed this one's gonna be a banger!

The Ram's avatar

Much of this boils back to our need to update section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Platforms should be responsible for their content. And responsible for fraud that occurs on their platforms. Let me explain...

We all know information is commerce, data is commerce, tech companies like google are not search engines, they sell marketing and ads. Spotify has never been about music or paying artists, they sell campaigns and ads. I've paid for those with my past albums until I realized how much of a scam it was.

We all know the current FCC is incompetent, so the SEC should broaden its scope to cover internet tech and commerce. Fraud, theft and misinformation should be treated the same way writing a fraudulent check is. A felony.

Tech providers will claim their freedom of speech is under attack, I've heard all the BS and excuses tech companies use to steal our private data, it's simple as having zero tolerance for FRAUD.

The EU will probably be the ones who first make changes on issues like this.