Spotify doesn’t appear to care that AI-generated music

is taking over the platform in order to defraud actual bands of their money.

 

 

 

The era of AI-generated music is here, and already, scammers are using Spotify to trick people into buying their obscene products.

According to Slate, a group of rabble-rousing fans of country music uncovered what amounts to a stream-stealing scam in which songs that are AI covers are added to playlists that are otherwise legitimate in order to accrue millions of listens.

These seemingly fraudulent bands, who went by names like “Highway Outlaws” and “Waterfront Wranglers,” most likely had the same characteristics: tens or hundreds of thousands of streams, no original songs, bios that seemed to have been written by ChatGPT, and no social media presence.

This “artist-robbing scam” was discovered, as one daring member noted on the r/CountryMusic subreddit, after one of the forum moderators came onto one such band and followed the trail of “similar to” artists, all of whom appeared to be equally fraudulent.

“When [the moderator] looked at ‘similar to’ artists, he discovered a huge cluster of identical AI ‘bands’ with massive monthly [listeners],” said on u/calibuildr. “They were all on playlists like ‘summer country vibes’ and clearly there’s some kind of inauthentic engagement going on here.”

To find out more about this bizarre mess, Slate reached out to 11A, a corporation that claims to represent the bands in question that appear to be scammers.

A representative for the alleged label stated they had proof that real artists worked on the covers, and the page, which has 117 followers on Facebook and hasn’t been updated in three years, has an expired domain name.

However, when pressed for further information, the spokesperson said nothing.

Surprisingly, Spotify maintains that despite the alleged AI covers disappearing during Slate’s inquiry, it did not remove them.

“Spotify does not have a policy against artists creating content using autotune or AI tools, as long as the content does not violate our other policies, including our deceptive content policy, which prohibits impersonation,” a spokesperson for Spotify told the outlet. “In this instance, the content was removed by the content providers.”

Needless to say, this problem is not exclusive to covers of country music. “This has been going on with jazz, electronic music, and ambient music for a few years now,” calibuildr told Slate.

The blog Metal Sucks also found similar scammy AI interpretations of metalcore songs that seemed to “hijack” real bands.

Spotify doesn’t seem to have a problem with AI music, therefore it is up to the labels of the musicians whose music is being covered by computers to get it taken down, or in the case of the bogus country covers, for the quote-unquote “content providers” to do it themselves.