The Hidden AI Scams on Spotify: Fake Bands, Real Money
Spotify is facing a wave of criticism, despite their shareholders being quite satisfied. The platform is tangled in controversies ranging from scams to lawsuits, with one of the strangest scams involving AI-generated content.
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The scam involves AI-generated covers of popular songs sneaking into large, publicly available playlists. These covers, disguised among real artist tracks, have racked up millions of listens and earned significant payouts. The "artists" behind these covers—groups like the Highway Outlaws, Waterfront Wranglers, and Saltwater Saddles—follow a curious pattern. They have hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners, no social media presence, and bios that sound suspiciously like they were written by AI. Initially discovered by vigilant Redditors investigating country music covers, the issue appears to span across various genres and decades. These bands don’t produce original music but instead cover a wide array of artists, making their AI-generated tracks hard to spot.
One Reddit user, calibuildr, who first brought attention to the scheme, pointed out that AI vocals are making this practice more common. A lawyer representing 11A, the label associated with these bands, claims that proper royalties are being paid and that human musicians are involved, though the label's online presence is nearly nonexistent.
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This situation raises questions about how to handle such deceptive practices. Spotify, in a statement, clarified that they don’t ban content created using autotune or AI tools as long as it doesn’t violate their deceptive content policies. In this case, the content was removed by the "content providers," likely the distributors who manage the music on behalf of these "bands."
Entertainment lawyer Henderson Cole suggests that while this practice isn’t technically illegal, it’s certainly exploitative. Spotify’s royalty system, which pools money and distributes it based on streaming percentages, means that original artists receive only a small portion of the earnings, with more going to the new performers and their labels.
Ultimately, it's the artists who are getting the short end of the stick, with AI-generated covers diluting their earnings and presence on streaming platforms.
Sources:
https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/spotify-stream-farming-fake-cover-bands-artificial-intelligence.html
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3495995/facebook-and-spotify-warn-europe-could-lag-in-ai-due-to-complex-regulations.html
