Streaming service Spotify looks to be in hot water yet again. According to reports, the platform has allowed fraudulent songs to appear on the verified pages of several dead artists. And those songs appear to be AI-generated.
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In a breaking report from 404 Media that dropped yesterday, late country musicians like Blaze Foley and Guy Clark are just a few victims of this recent occurrence. One song, titled “Together”, was uploaded to Spotify last week under Blaze Foley’s name. For reference, Foley was tragically killed in 1989.
Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media noted that the song was accompanied by an obviously AI-generated cover. The image featured a young singer who bore no resemblance to Foley at all. The song has since been taken down.
Maiberg spoke to the label that distributes Foley’s music. The owner, Craig McDonald, agreed that the song itself sounded like it was AI-generated.
Spotify Has Since Affirmed That Fraudulent AI Songs Will Not Be Tolerated, but the Problem Still Stands
“It’s harmful to Blaze’s standing that this happened,” said McDonald. “It’s kind of surprising that Spotify doesn’t have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. […] One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so.”
Spotify would later comment that they removed the song for violating their terms of service. They also blamed the distributor for the mishap. However, after some digging, 404 Media revealed that “Together” could be traced to a company called Syntax Error. That company owns a copyright that appears on an AI-generated song that recently appeared on late country crooner Guy Clark’s Spotify page. That song, called “Happened To You”, was also taken down this week. This proves an ongoing issue with AI-generated, fraudulent music making its way onto Spotify.
The AI rabbit hole appears to run deep with Spotify, too. Recently, a band called The Velvet Sundown pulled in millions of streams on the platform. They recently revealed that the entire band is fully AI-generated.
Spotify has recently tried to calm the storm by asserting that all deceptive content on the platform is against its content policies. They also noted that they are working to take such content down.
“The content in question violates Spotify’s deceptive content policies, which prohibit impersonation intended to mislead, such as replicating another creator’s name, image, or description, or posing as a person, brand, or organization in a deceptive manner,” a statement from a Spotify rep said. “This is not allowed. We take action against licensors and distributors who fail to police for this kind of fraud and those who commit repeated or egregious violations can and have been permanently removed from Spotify.”
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns
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