That's absolutely insane that they don't have some sort of 2 factor authentication requirements for uploading to official pages. Hopefully this outbreak of fake songs will make something change to avoid this from continuing.
2FA has nothing to do with this - it's not that they hacked their password, it's that there is no mechanism to verify ownership over a band name, because band names aren't bound to accounts. I suspect the reasoning for this is twofold: 1. Distributors might not necessarily be able to distinguish between bands that have the same name (think common names like Covenant or Hybrid), so you wouldn't want an account to be able to lock a name that other bands also have. This is because various streaming platforms work very differently. 2. It'd need to be a many-to-many type of account system because every band would need to have the band AND their current label AND their previous labels (for older releases, re-releases, remasters, etc) to be able to access the ability to add new releases to a band name. This is not to rationalize a broken system, but I wanna stress again that this isn't a problem of someone's password being cracked.
You could have a war on Spotify with this. Imagine flooding Swift with AI Deathcore, or Meshuggah with AI Country. It is really sounding like the Dead Internet hypothesis is a real thing.
Spotify also has a big problem with people claiming to have collabs with famous bands or artists to push their songs. There are times I get like 2-4 songs like this in my 'Release Radar' playlist. So annoying. It shouldn't be difficult to insert an authorization mechanism right?
And that's being done in almost the same exact way as people just releasing AI music to actual band/artist channels. There needs to be way better safeguards in place.
I saw Queen show up in my release radar, got excited and turns out it was a cover by Megan Thee Stallion. They just put Queen as a co-artist to make it look like they hade an input on that garbage and to trick you into listening to it.
I have gotte so many of those... But then again, it seems that Spotify on their chill instrumental guitar lists and such also have AI generated stuff, so they don't have to pay royalities...
I don't think that is an AI problem. That is a Problem in general. AI just makes it way easier. From what you described no one is stopping me to upload anything to real artists channels. It does not have to be AI generated. The same problem has UA-cam (and others) with all those copyright scams. It is way, WAY too easy to abuse the system.
Very good point, but to put real music on there you’d actually have to take the time to write and record it yourself. With AI, you can make a song in seconds and just keep throwing them online. And if the point is the scam the system for royalties. Why would you waste your time writing an original song?
Not entirely disagreeing with you but in one way it *is* an AI problem. If I uploaded a random song to an artist's channel, it will be immediately spotted as a fake. With AI deepfakes, you can actually make it sound like the artist in question - this making the fraud much harder to spot.
@@SRMNS93 The scammers do not care about that. Just last week some New Age easy listening was posted as a Dark Tranquillity album on Tidal. It's been removed now, but they certainly did not make any effort to make it seem like the band whose page it was on.
@@henrihell If the purpose of the scam is to make money, the longer the scam goes undetected, the more money you will make. If I see new age easy listening posted as a Dark Tranquility album, I'm going to immediately suspect it is a fake and not listen any further. If it actually sounds like Dark Tranquility, I could get taken in and end up streaming the album a bunch of times. For the scammer to make money, the music does need to get streamed a large number of times.
@@SRMNS93 they'll get a few more streams from real people for sure. However, when the idea is to botfarm the real people are only gonna amount to a small percentage of the total streams so I don't think they'd care too much.
Great video. I follow several jazz and jazz fusion artists that have had songs show up on their profile, and not necessarily AI generated. There really does need to be some safeguards in place.
Wow, I am actually blown away, that there isn't a safeguard system in place, when you upload a new song for an artist already. Why is this even possible and so easy to do in the first place? I did not expect something like this. So I can actually upload my sh*tty AI generated sailor shanties, with the voice of Tank the Tech, to Taylor Swift just like that? Holy ...
I noticed that on Tidal when there were 2 new full length albums by Grayscale released on the same day. I looked at the credits & it looks like the "composer" released multiple albums by multiple artists, most by existing bands. There were hundreds of songs all released on the same day. There needs to be an easy way to report these people.
Time to buy CDs again... The hunt for that CD is part of the fun and to joy of finding one, well, near unbeatable. Also they can't take it away from you.
That same AI proliferation is also on youtube, I have to remove channels from my recommendations every week for being AI slop thrown to the void by someone hoping to make some bucks out of it. Small edit: It was always gonna turn into a tool to churn out stuff to make money. It's always been marketed to management people as a way to cut creatives out of the process, so it was bound to become a race to make the most money out of it.
I have no problem with AI or assisted AI music. I know there are several lyricists who are pushing out some really good stuff that is much better than most of the mainstream stuff. As long as it bangs and I connect with it, I do not care who or what made it. I don't like the BOTS issue or people using these methods to deceive such as what he explained about posting on someone's page, that is crazy, but was bound to happen, Now I'm sure a ton of more idiots will try it since they know its a thing now, so many bad apples.
that is fcking WILD man! i had seen some... weird activity on some channels that i follow, but i had no idea it was THIS, and even less of an idea it was THAT BAD. artists should be protected a LOT better. Also Tank, i would love hearing your thoughts about music from some major artists (talking about more main stream artists now), being "leaked" and uploaded to YT. and there's literally NOBODY that's doing ANYTHING about it. there are even servers on discord who are based around people trying to get their hands on these "leaks" and then publish them freely. (i know this because i've met people who tried luring me into one of these servers.) i would appreciate it if you could bring that up, in a future video.
When I recently distributed my old band's album, it seemed pretty easy to say you had an existing artist page. We didn't, but there were steps needed to link things to my YT/Google account and easy steps to claim the Spotify pages and whatnot. It's surprising that there's no checks or authentication/approvals to publish to an existing artist page. Spotify and these outlets need to take accountability and ensure that this can't happen. Same with AI music. I think AI music tools are a good resource for creative people that perhaps can't play instruments but have visions they'd want to see realized. Or, in my case, use AI generations as inspirations to get ideas from. But Spotify and such need to take action and make sure AI music is *clearly* highlighted and segregated from real musicians. AI music is still an artistic expression - made by a person with a creative vision in mind - but not art that's physically created by someone. We can't diminish or otherwise reduce real artists and bands visibility in the music space. There needs to be a clear line so musicians or artists in both camps can thrive.
Another issue is getting your real artist tracks put on bot playlists that get your tracks removed from streaming altogether completely out of your control. I had this happen to one of my tracks and as a small artist it is such a punch in the gut when you think your track is popping off and the next day you check Spotify artists and all the plays are fake.
Thanx for the insight on this. I was wondering how these random uploads happen to bands‘ accounts. And it’s absolutely mindblowing that bands don’t have control over what can be uploaded to their accounts. 🤯
An Artist by the name of Rain Paris has an Album on her profile called Relaxing Ocean Ambient. Funny thing is, she's never released an Album. She only releases Singles/EPs and the Album itself is under a Label that she's not normally under. The Album has 30 songs in it and I believe has been up for a few days. There needs to be more Safeguards for Artists!
Streaming services have been corrupt for a very long time, especially Spotify. It has been rife with Bots, Stream Farms and fake, so-called "noise" tracks pratically since its inception. This AI stuff is just another example how they've failed to control thir platform.
I'm an artist but not in music. Drawing and digital painting. This topic has been going on for while already and a lot of artists are protesting against AI. Because oh boy... People posting AI art while claiming it would be handdrawn stuff, making tons of money. Stealing peoples artist identities, making money in their name. Or just training an AI to replicate someones entire style, which they're developed over years of practice. Their skill, craftsmanship, suddenly without value from one day to the next. Most of it isn't even illegal. A lot of sites and social medias themselves now have policies that they're allowed to use any uploaded pictures from users to train their own AI. It's a huge mess.
I don't like AI in music especially using the voice dead artists like hearing Chester Bennington singing the Evanescence song My Immortal or Freddie Mercury singing the A-ha song take on me, I find it creepy in so many ways
I'm surprised it's taken people this long to start uploading to other artist's pages, when I started distributing my band's music to Spotify I noticed how easy it would be immediately.
That's weird that you talk about AI because last thursday, i have talked about the danger of AI inside the metal music because tons of peoples does complete albums made only by AI when the real artists works hard to built song, lyrics, albums and they dont made lots of money outside touring and maybe merch, in my side, this AI album could kill metal or other music style in the future.
I don't think AI is going to kill off any music genre. It's not like real artists will disappear and all you're going to get is AI music. But it will be used for a lot of things, and lately it's been being used for a lot of not so great things.
Blame the generic pseudocore and powernintendo bands and the fact how easy it is for AI to regurgitate that crap. No AI will ever be able to imitate bands like Savatage, Manilla Road, Fates Warning, Crimson Glory, Cirith Ungol etc
@@TankTheTech What AI will do great damage to is stuff like production/sync music, where music has to be tailor made to a given scenario and edited a certain way - there will be a lot of companies with low standards who'll just opt to Suno together something garbage instead of paying a production music studio - same way image synthesizers were hurting newspaper illustrators or LLMs are hurting people writing stuff like product descriptions and manuals.
Two things to add from my own experience: 1. I am getting spammed with AI Music Maker programs on UA-cam lately which is kinda worrying. 2. The uploads on other spotify accounts has been a major topic in some Jpop/Vocaloid circles. E.g. the band Vivid Bad Squad from a Vocaloid mobile game had (on more than one occasion) russian songs uploaded to their page.
Honestly, glad this is finally being covered by someone bigger because, for a good few of the smaller hardcore/screamo artists I see, I keep seeing fake AI songs getting uploaded. Really annoying cause I just want new music from the artists. There isn’t even a way to report these AI songs from a listener/fan
I think the internet is broken in general. I work in marketing and control a number of Google Business accounts, and it's amazing how easy it is for third parties to upload photos, change information, and more. It's a constant battle. So, the lack of safeguards does not surprise me. There definitely should be safeguards, but I fear that will require legislation, and I have little confidence that will happen.
My guess is why we see all this now is because off Spotify new rule that you have to have x amount of streams before you get paid. So now the AI farmers need to get a "real artist" on Spotify.
The Spotify situation is just stupid. How hard is it to just send an email to a registered address by the verified artists asking "hey, your profile has a new song, do you confirm"? People have invented things like two-factor authentication and it doesn't even have to be that complex. Just the "trust me bro" approach is very amateurish for a business that operates with so much money.
This is why bands should not care if they have 2k streams or 2 million streams. How many of these artists are faking it? more than we think. It's so sad that labels, managers, etc care about numbers when it can all be faked.
I do wonder to what extent it's illegal to use bots to generate clicks on your own songs? Is there actual legislation about it? Because otherwise they could have a hard time convicting him. "We know that what you did was wrong, but it's not illegal"...
I don't think you need any special legislation for that. If they can prove it was his AI bots boosting the stream statistics of AI songs he uploaded to extract royalties from streaming services then its fraud, plain and simple. If he wouldn't have collected royalties then it maybe is just unethical to boost your steam stats. But he did so its fraud. All this is my opinion, of course.
@@35milesofleadview botting may be “against the TOS,” but there’s no way you can look at the sheer volume of actual bots on any given video and not think UA-cam’s fully aware of the view botting situation. That’s the issue here- companies take in revenue hand over fist for fake engagement, which is why they all allow it to continue.
@BasedHyperborean I don't spend a huge amount of time in the comments, but I have seen the bots and scam giveaways. All I can say on the matter is I have looked into and partially subscribe to the dead internet theory.
This happened to us last month, and Spotify took our new release down for suspicious activity. It’s back up now, weeks later, but man what a massive pain in the ass.
The problem is not AI per sea, it is the fact that you can upload to someone else's channel without going through an authentication process (what good does it do to have a password to your account if someone can pretend to be you?).
I remember some random person making random crappy music was uploading music pretending to be the band Allister and this was maybe 8 years ago. A couple of months ago someone did this to Jack Off Jill and there was other artists I know that had this happen. It was extremely hard for these bands to get Spotify to remove them despite complaints from the bands and dozens of fans. I think they need to find a way to prevent this.
Ok as a combat vet, military person I wrote a lot of fkd up shit and it’s been in a notebook for 30 years… I have a good ear but no musical talent so I have been inputting my lyrics into AI and to me the songs are amazing.. I’m not hiding the fact that I use Ai or trying to scam anyone.. why shouldn’t I be allowed to share my music? It’s no different than me writing a song and selling it .. Elvis was the first AI fraud because he never wrote a single song in his life.. he just sang what others gave him..
@@dprice2800 I don’t care if they suck, I do it for me.. I only share to see if anyone happens to like them.. lol.. check out The Fungi Files on your favorite music channel..
I remember my 'What's new' feed being full of different metalcore artists, but with the same cover art from these ai generated songs. It was very strange. Went to go check if some of artists spoke up about it, and some did as mentioned in the video above. AI can definitely be scary when used with malicious intent.
Small bands are going to be the most affected by this stuff, that's why my content focuses on indie bands/artists....I saw a video on Rick Beato's channel where he called out a guy who called himself artist and wrote him an email saying he had a hit song that he had done with AI... WTF??? There are some people out there making hundreds of songs just with a prompt, upload them to Spotify and make money with it. It's a numbers games. If you can't get enough plays as a true artist, upload thousands of songs that just with a few plays may generate some cash... Yes, the system is broken left and right.
It's a tool. Don't see any issue with it, just like most of the music You listen to has either "electronic" or noninstrument parts included, and sometimes it isn't even the actual artists that record them. It will weed itself, because just because you post something doesn't mean it's going to get heard, if it's shit, not going to do well, if it has some legs and people like it then it deserves to be heard. The cream will ALWAYS rise to the top, shit will always collect at the bottom, well, I mean most of today's music is pretty much just that so I guess it's a wake up call, make better music.
AI art isn't. We need a new word to describe "art" which is made (plagiarized) by AI, so we don't confuse it with the act of a genuine human artist creating art.
I’ve thought about this a lot, and to me, it’s any human to medium connection. AI isn’t a medium (medium in this sense being stylus to iPad, ink to paper, oil to canvas and so on) basically the artists very own hand and mind to… creation whatever it may be from a drawing to sculpture. AI makes zero real connection so there ya go.
This AI business is getting out of hand. I made a post promoting an upcoming EP and the comments were flooded with "it's AI!" and "you guys got scammed!" I know my artist did not sell me AI art but it bothers me that we've come to that point.
Isn't there talk about Spotify most likely using AI generated music in their own playlists as well? Chill guitar instrumentals and such? Because it is full of unknown artists that ahve like one song and that one song is in one or multiple Spotify playlists? Of course, Spotify could have just hired a session musician to do the same, but it all seems like a suspect way to not pay royalities.
Looked at my Spotify New Releases section this morning, like I do every Friday morning, and got super excited when I saw Witchcraft pop up. But then I saw the artwork and quickly realized it was a fraudulent AI upload. This is only going to get worse.
So when I had Ozzy’s “Mr. Crowley” queued up on Spotify, the same one that had been saved on My List for years, and when the lyrics came in instead of Ozzy I heard some loser voice from “JuntunenPHD”, that was this too? The song had the original cover art from “The Essential Ozzy Osborne” album, led back to that album, but played the other “band’s” song.
A point about AI, I don't think you can file copyright on anything AI generated at the moment. I might be mistaken but last I saw anything AI generated is open source and can be used for anything at any time. So all of these songs can be downloaded and placed anywhere by anyone as well. Also many AI programs a extremely predatory and in the digital image world they have used a lot of copyrighted material to generate their algorithms without any form of permissions. Adobe is losing customers because they now have a clause in their TOS which gives them unlimited rights to your content if you use any of their programs, which includes being sent to 3rd party companies.
eh you have to be careful with that cause if the lyics were written, that is copyrightable, also people are creating stems, separating them, recording those that they can and remixing, so you can play that game and might end up in some legal trouble, and not to mention things other things that can be easily done to proof first creation and ownership.
That's why youtube music has comments turned off for people who use it through the regular, non pay youtube service. There was a spell where you would even see some variation of the comment "this is my dad's music" "my dad liked this music". You can even find some videos still up that are separate from youtube music that still have these kinds of comments. It was 100 percent bots juicing the streams.
It's a numbers game, they did it already in the '50s, nothing new. If the game x=x+1, we're hardwired to do anything to add that 1, honesty comes second if not even last. Streaming just made it worse. If you had to buy your digital download (and then listen how many times you like), you'd have to shelve out lots of money to boost your own sales or find a way to boost those numbers without real spending. With streams, it's like taking candy from a child.
huh that explains my release radar page on spotify lately. I removed bands from it thinking they went the lazy route of generating AI songs, but their pages being hijacked makes sense
AI, bots, artificial streams...all that needs to go. My first EP, which I spent 6 months working on, got pulled from Spotify. They accused me of "artificial streaming," but I didn't do anything of the sort. I never paid a promoter, or anyone else, for that matter, to add my music to a playlist or even promote it. Yet, somehow, this still happened. There's times when my numbers spike on Spotify, but then they drop back off. It seems like they just don't believe that an independent artist who doesn't promote himself could legitimately get that many streams. I'm surprised they haven't pulled my latest single yet because it's already approaching 2,400 streams in just over a year 😅
First time I saw this was about 3 years ago and Behemoth had a whole album of circus music uploaded to their page. It was bizarre and when I went to show someone a couple days later it was gone.
Saw this happen to Twin Temple, it was a "remix" and it sounded god awful, it only stayed up for about 24 hours but i ended up downloading it before it got taken down just because of how ridiculous it sounded
Bingo! I've been saying this for ages: anyone with a veeeeeery basic IT and development knowledge can see that the system is flawed to the core, and solving these issues takes very little time for any decent developer, the same goes for the payment processors involved. The fact that you can claim any profile, and consequently upload (via a distributor, mind you, not directly) speaks volume about what they care about. The fact that the guy made over $10 million, show this went on for a long while. If it takes you that long to see someone is demolishing your house brick by brick, you shouldn't be allowed to have a house in the first place. The whole world is held together with spit, it's a miracle we are still alive.
I've been following this story for the last week and Tank got a hold of it and did this piece. Does anyone else who is aware of this story think that the dude didn't do anything wrong? This dude created a system that exploited something in the system and made money from it. NO ONE WAS HURT. NO SINGLE ARTIST WAS DAMAGED BY IT, NOT EVEN FINANCIALLY. Spotify was the only one that lost something because they thought the guy was making more money than he ought to be making AND that it was Spotify that was paying for it. There are no laws for it because it hasn't happened yet until now but there will probably be a law for it because the fucking streaming company will pay lawyers and the court system to make it so. If the bandit streamer genius goes to jail for it, then it will be made an example by Spotify and other streaming services to not fuck with their money. And so about money...anyone paying attention to the streaming space knows that Spotify is one of the most fucked up places to put your stuff on because the payout is fucking dogshit AND they limited when you actually get paid with some arbitrary metric that many streamers cannot achieve (you must have 1000 something in order to be paid). We all saw it to be another greedy play and this streamer bandit dude is basically doing ju-jitsu on their technology to make the most out of the exploit. I think it's just desserts for Spotify and hopefully this guy took his earnings and invested it in shit that will keep him comfortable for the rest of his life. The guy did the work, created a snazzy workflow to make the bucks, and Spotify called him out on it. Here's the thing: there are others. There are probably others who made more than this guy and other systems working on multiple accounts to generate more money that this dude. Catching this one guy is an attempt to set an example of hackers who fuck with them. It's a warning...LOL. Spotify just wants to keep making money and screwing artists. Spotify is not the good guys here. This guy scammed a scammer company and I don't think he did anything wrong. He was clever and brilliant.
I saw this action on stream, and I can confirm that placing a song takes about 10 minutes, as Tank said. Spotify should be better in protecting content creators.
This AI stuff is truly getting out of hand and i hate it. That one weird record that got released about a month ago was bonkers. Its been since taken down thankfully. A few bands i know it happened to were Make Them Suffer and Brand Of Sacrifice, it happened to many more but those are the two bands i have saved that it happened to. It was some wacky AI instrumental metal. This whole album shit was taken down hours after being uploaded. I was concerned for MTS because the song sounded sorta like their music, i was also concerned about BOS, but not as much only because the AI track vs their actual music was like trying to put a plane in a car dealership and sell it as a car. It was that obvious. Which was good, but i know several other bands that also had this issue that didnt get away so easily. Im afraid that somehow some AI deathcore is gonna get uploaded one day if it hasnt already and tear apart everything.
It is very strange that when you choose an artist that's already been claimed, it doesn't hold the submission for review and notify the owner of that artist profile. Like it's not just AI, I've seen small artists with the same name get legitimately mixed up, but like, our profile can likely be traced back to our email on the backend, so it makes sense to confirm that it is or isn't us trying to upload music from a different account. Surely, once the music is submitted to streaming platforms, the systems can recognize that the uploaders are different and will push out a notification to the proper artist. AI is scary, it desperately needs to be regulated.
@@EwanMarshall Correct, I've been using Distrokid for years. And while you don't log in to upload music, you do log in to Spotify, Apple Music, etc. to manage your artist profile. If that artist profile has already been claimed, edited, and had music submitted to, then distributors and streaming platforms should be working in tandem to make sure that your profile remains yours so that this can't happen.
There is a super interesting german docu series called "Dirty Little Secrets" that came out last year. In Episode 2 they focus on how the music industry itself is gaming the system. F.e. the publisher holds the rights to lets say "crazy train" by ozzy and then they go to some musicians they have on retainer and let them change the song to like a music box style. Then they put in on "sleep" and "meditation" playlists that they themselves own and rake in millions of streams. Not illegal, but still fucked up. They are taking money from real artits the way the Spotify payout system works. Also if they are doing it this way until now, it would be naive to think they won't switch to AI and get that nonsense music for free.
Spotify have been doing a horrendous job protecting the integrity of their artists for a very long time now. While AI is unbelievably predatory & intrusive, I think Spotify deserves a lot of flak for allowing these songs to make it onto official artist feeds in the first place. Not too long ago there was the "Sped Up" & "Slowed Down" trend where 'fans' were uploading personal edits to a band's official feed, and we've had unrelated artists using established bands for collab credits for pretty much as long as I can remember. It needs to be significantly more difficult to upload and authorize a track for an artist. They've had multiple opportunities to look towards their own system and try to fix it to avoid something like this from happening, but I suppose they're just going to look the other way until it escalates to a point where it starts to potentially impact them for a change.
This is sad man. With all the advances in technology yet can’t catch this. Yikes. Side note. New WhiteChapel slaps harder than anything they’ve put out before
I have never been a friend of artificial intelligence and never will be. It was perfectly clear that if you give mankind such a powerful tool, it will be used to do things that are not legal or to harm other people. Regardless of the fact that I have seen Terminator.
What I've also noticed now is that there are an incredible number of hip-hop songs on UA-cam that have been mixed together with AI from various other songs and then marketed as the new release of 2024. Artificial intelligence has created a huge problem for itself by releasing it for humanity. Apart from the fact that it will kill us at some point anyway, as I said. Terminator. 😅
That is insane it is allowed to happen. You think the artist would have control over their own page and would have to authorize songs. Streaming has devalued physical music so much and we have gone to far that we can not go back to mostly physical music. Lars was right
Unfortunately, taking over someone else's Spotify profile isn't just about AI songs. Even real artists some time ago released music by featuring well-known artists who never took part, simply a mean way to get noticed.
It does suck that theres no way to prevent people from doing this, but at least theyre getting caught and in trouble. Id be 10x more worried if they were caught but legally didnt do anything wrong. It just sucks in general the amount of people that only see music as a means to an end, not a form of art. Music is magic, not a fast cash heist.
This has been a problem even way before AI started getting so prevalent. I've had to deal with this issue time and time again with my band. Honestly I feel as if an artist should get a code attached to their profile and only the people with access to that code can upload to said profile.
Torn a bit here - making this common knowledge and spreading it seems important, and puts pressure on the industry to change something. But at the same time, right now they haven't changed it, so people watching this might get some really stupid ideas (you know, stupid people do stupid things). Kinda similar to how hackers often report exploits to the company itself first, in the style of "fix this asap before I publish this". Though obviously those companies have to already know about it and better already be working on a solution...
AI songs uploaded as another artist is fraud. What the guy was doing was a huge grey area in relation to AI. What was wrong was using bots to up the streaming count. Not sure I would classify that as it being an AI issue (just that AI allowed him to create more songs that any other way) so AI added to it but wasn't really the part that was wrong. All just my .02 so take it at that.
On the flip side. What is stopping a band from using AI to make a song? Maybe not upload it. But use it to build grooves, beats, lyrics, etc? Slightly tweaking it. Taking all the real creativity out and basically doing similar music. How many bands have not really adjusted a sound or lyric topic? Seems like an easy path of AI learning. What if they like the AI made song so much that it's now just learning it to claim its actually their work?
As I've listened to what you had to say and it's really concerning. People like Michael Smith and what he did without any consideration, sadly this needed to happen otherwise who knows how many people did that previously!? And international law must have some thought about how it's going to be implemented, it can't just be U.S law or E. U law it must be for every country.
Was wondering what was going on with those songs/albums. "Feared" (ola englund)'s band had some weird album pop up the other day. Had a feeling this is what might have been happening, all about money.
i think something similar was there a few years ago with spotify, not with AI but someone who created songs and streamed the first 31seconds (min 30sec to get paid). and i think he lost. EDIT it was in denmark, he made about 300.000 usd between 2013 and 2019 and was sent to 18 month in prison
I am surprised Spotify does not use AI detection software when music is being uploaded to their systems/servers. I have applied for software engineer jobs where they say if you AI to answer technical questions or complete code task on the application or second stage of the hiring process they'll use that software to make sure you have not cheated.
ai is not the issue it's the people doing things that are shady, which is almost impossible to stop, hence why you have grandma calling you in need of money, it's her voice, but it's a dude in a foreign country stealing your cash.
Unbelievable this is going on. But don't most metal bands on Spotify earn next to nothing from the service? Why would the AI scammers bother with metal bands. I know it would be obvious on the big pop acts accounts but they wouldn't get a lot from most metal bands
I directly want to rectify something: babymetal & electric calboy get a 50/50 split yes, BUT, thats after their labels take the biggest cut. Unless, both don’t have a label and hold all rights to the music themselves
What it will take, sadly, will end up costing artists $ and be a whole new revenue scam for the government. But artists would generally need to register at a central 'music' agency, and all the releases tied to this registered ID (that they would need to prove somehow who they are @ registration). All their songs uploaded to the various music outlets would need registry validation as well. And this being a new set of laws means the government will charge for overseeing the whole thing even if they are not the ones maintaining the 'registry' information. The 2nd thing will annoy humans using music services (and/or social media) bots can be mostly thwarted by deploying a 'prove you are human' authentication. AI, and dumb bots especially, cannot do human things yet. Mainly b/c this is not true 'AI' but human-coded pattern matching on top of a 'large language' data model. But that would mean every 'listen'/like/etc. would stop and go 'prove you are human'. And be updated when coders determine how to get around that new 'proof' methodology.
This is just insane. I play around with AI music and am in the process of putting together an album of AI music. I don't expect to make money off of it, I just want to share what the AI creates. But it's scary just how easy people can use the same tools for shit like this.
Spotify appears to have a problem in general with uniquely identifying artists. For instance, if you go to The Warning’s artist page, after all of the normal listings you will see links for some punk rock collections, apparently because of some previous punk band that used the same band name (band names are often recycled inadvertently). My guess is that Spotify is just using the band name to make this link. Maybe the platform’s design is broken in some way. As a software developer I can tell you that if you mess something up at that level it can be incredibly hard to fix.
I suspect they have an unique identifier for the band The Warning consisting of three sisters from Monterey Mexico. BUT when as a user you do the query for The Warning it is going to generate a page using the style for the current The Warning but also including all the songs etc for the Warning that would include the old bands songs. It was sloppy software engineering that has been paved over by a thousand updates to the software. As you pointed, extremely hard to fix at this point. It essentially would require a rewrite of that part of the software. Now the difficult question- will they spend the money to fix this problem. Probably not until it begins to cost THEM money.
@@scottwheeler2494 Tidal also seems to identify song authors by only their name, so it can show incorrect listings for a songwriter. That’s a bit less of an issue I guess but I don’t know if they do better for band names. And you are right they won’t fix anything unless it affects the bottom line.
@@markjames8664 it's funny. I would have been identifying by tax payer ID from the start. That's the one that counts... who gets paid. Then create an alias tied to the EIN. But I always worked in finance systems so that is my bias. It would be easy to keep the BS out then. The bands and or publishers would do it since a wrong EIN would mean someone besides them would be getting paid. But regardless, we have already established they failed in their engineering.
I caught on to the scam very quickly because some bands like Born of Osiris had an AI single uploaded literally a day or 2 after they released an official single from an upcoming album. And then you scroll down the page on Spotify and look at the producer info and the names are literal gibberish.
Yeah I was kind of afraid this would happen. For some time I would get Eastern European rap acts playing while listening to Spotify and when I would look at what the hell was going on I noticed they all had names of punk bands and hardcore punk bands. At first I kind of dismissed it, thinking Terror is a name that more people would use. But at some point they just had the more out there hardcore band names as their artist name. That is when I figured they abused the system, just to upload under someone else's name, didn't have to pay to get on spotify and could just take the revenue. Probably also because many of those bands would be too small for Spotify to care
What if short beard Tank is AI and the real tank is being held captive somewhere?
That's absolutely insane that they don't have some sort of 2 factor authentication requirements for uploading to official pages. Hopefully this outbreak of fake songs will make something change to avoid this from continuing.
THIS!!!!
Exactly my thought: no password or something needed? That is so weird!!!! And stupid.
At this point they don't even have single factor auth.. just go
2FA has nothing to do with this - it's not that they hacked their password, it's that there is no mechanism to verify ownership over a band name, because band names aren't bound to accounts.
I suspect the reasoning for this is twofold:
1. Distributors might not necessarily be able to distinguish between bands that have the same name (think common names like Covenant or Hybrid), so you wouldn't want an account to be able to lock a name that other bands also have. This is because various streaming platforms work very differently.
2. It'd need to be a many-to-many type of account system because every band would need to have the band AND their current label AND their previous labels (for older releases, re-releases, remasters, etc) to be able to access the ability to add new releases to a band name.
This is not to rationalize a broken system, but I wanna stress again that this isn't a problem of someone's password being cracked.
This might be a hot take: but - thinking that 2fa is the be-all-end-all.
You could have a war on Spotify with this. Imagine flooding Swift with AI Deathcore, or Meshuggah with AI Country. It is really sounding like the Dead Internet hypothesis is a real thing.
I rather have AI Chester and AI Taylor make a duet song, very poppy nu metal with djent guitars
AI Shinoda and AI Corey rap/scream in the breakdown
🤣
@@Vivaildi
Much better use of AI than making cheap imitative songs
That was hilarious when you called that person during the stream. “I think he’s low-key pissed”. Lol.
Did it get resolved? Sometimes it's better to ask for permission beforehand... 😅
Spotify also has a big problem with people claiming to have collabs with famous bands or artists to push their songs. There are times I get like 2-4 songs like this in my 'Release Radar' playlist. So annoying. It shouldn't be difficult to insert an authorization mechanism right?
And that's being done in almost the same exact way as people just releasing AI music to actual band/artist channels. There needs to be way better safeguards in place.
I saw Queen show up in my release radar, got excited and turns out it was a cover by Megan Thee Stallion. They just put Queen as a co-artist to make it look like they hade an input on that garbage and to trick you into listening to it.
Well, not necessarily. Due to copyrights and song crediting, it may have been a stipulation from Queen's side that they had to be on there.
@@thesteamycreamofdualjabbar6486 Thats way different. They paid Queen for samples or something
I have gotte so many of those... But then again, it seems that Spotify on their chill instrumental guitar lists and such also have AI generated stuff, so they don't have to pay royalities...
We are forced to use 2 factor ID and stupid secure passwords for even the most unimportant accounts, and online music platforms rely on HONESTY?!?
Really important topic thanks for making this!
❤️❤️❤️ PERKELE
The world was a better place when everyone thought SOAD wrote a Legend of Zelda song.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Simpler times.
I COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT THAT
Thanks for reminding me. Will binge listen to this all night now.
@@juanjr00 everyone was like "dude this is 100% SOAD" and we all took it for granted
@@the_verTigO "Link has come to town..."
I don't think that is an AI problem. That is a Problem in general. AI just makes it way easier. From what you described no one is stopping me to upload anything to real artists channels. It does not have to be AI generated.
The same problem has UA-cam (and others) with all those copyright scams. It is way, WAY too easy to abuse the system.
Very good point, but to put real music on there you’d actually have to take the time to write and record it yourself. With AI, you can make a song in seconds and just keep throwing them online. And if the point is the scam the system for royalties. Why would you waste your time writing an original song?
Not entirely disagreeing with you but in one way it *is* an AI problem. If I uploaded a random song to an artist's channel, it will be immediately spotted as a fake. With AI deepfakes, you can actually make it sound like the artist in question - this making the fraud much harder to spot.
@@SRMNS93 The scammers do not care about that. Just last week some New Age easy listening was posted as a Dark Tranquillity album on Tidal. It's been removed now, but they certainly did not make any effort to make it seem like the band whose page it was on.
@@henrihell If the purpose of the scam is to make money, the longer the scam goes undetected, the more money you will make. If I see new age easy listening posted as a Dark Tranquility album, I'm going to immediately suspect it is a fake and not listen any further. If it actually sounds like Dark Tranquility, I could get taken in and end up streaming the album a bunch of times. For the scammer to make money, the music does need to get streamed a large number of times.
@@SRMNS93 they'll get a few more streams from real people for sure. However, when the idea is to botfarm the real people are only gonna amount to a small percentage of the total streams so I don't think they'd care too much.
Great video. I follow several jazz and jazz fusion artists that have had songs show up on their profile, and not necessarily AI generated. There really does need to be some safeguards in place.
Also happened to Dark Tranquillity. I was listening to their album Endtime Signals yesterday and there were AI songs mixed in.
Wow, I am actually blown away, that there isn't a safeguard system in place, when you upload a new song for an artist already. Why is this even possible and so easy to do in the first place? I did not expect something like this.
So I can actually upload my sh*tty AI generated sailor shanties, with the voice of Tank the Tech, to Taylor Swift just like that? Holy ...
I noticed that on Tidal when there were 2 new full length albums by Grayscale released on the same day. I looked at the credits & it looks like the "composer" released multiple albums by multiple artists, most by existing bands. There were hundreds of songs all released on the same day. There needs to be an easy way to report these people.
Time to buy CDs again... The hunt for that CD is part of the fun and to joy of finding one, well, near unbeatable. Also they can't take it away from you.
That same AI proliferation is also on youtube, I have to remove channels from my recommendations every week for being AI slop thrown to the void by someone hoping to make some bucks out of it.
Small edit: It was always gonna turn into a tool to churn out stuff to make money. It's always been marketed to management people as a way to cut creatives out of the process, so it was bound to become a race to make the most money out of it.
I have no problem with AI or assisted AI music. I know there are several lyricists who are pushing out some really good stuff that is much better than most of the mainstream stuff. As long as it bangs and I connect with it, I do not care who or what made it. I don't like the BOTS issue or people using these methods to deceive such as what he explained about posting on someone's page, that is crazy, but was bound to happen, Now I'm sure a ton of more idiots will try it since they know its a thing now, so many bad apples.
that is fcking WILD man!
i had seen some... weird activity on some channels that i follow, but i had no idea it was THIS, and even less of an idea it was THAT BAD.
artists should be protected a LOT better.
Also Tank, i would love hearing your thoughts about music from some major artists (talking about more main stream artists now), being "leaked" and uploaded to YT.
and there's literally NOBODY that's doing ANYTHING about it.
there are even servers on discord who are based around people trying to get their hands on these "leaks" and then publish them freely. (i know this because i've met people who tried luring me into one of these servers.)
i would appreciate it if you could bring that up, in a future video.
When I recently distributed my old band's album, it seemed pretty easy to say you had an existing artist page. We didn't, but there were steps needed to link things to my YT/Google account and easy steps to claim the Spotify pages and whatnot. It's surprising that there's no checks or authentication/approvals to publish to an existing artist page. Spotify and these outlets need to take accountability and ensure that this can't happen.
Same with AI music. I think AI music tools are a good resource for creative people that perhaps can't play instruments but have visions they'd want to see realized. Or, in my case, use AI generations as inspirations to get ideas from. But Spotify and such need to take action and make sure AI music is *clearly* highlighted and segregated from real musicians. AI music is still an artistic expression - made by a person with a creative vision in mind - but not art that's physically created by someone. We can't diminish or otherwise reduce real artists and bands visibility in the music space. There needs to be a clear line so musicians or artists in both camps can thrive.
Another issue is getting your real artist tracks put on bot playlists that get your tracks removed from streaming altogether completely out of your control.
I had this happen to one of my tracks and as a small artist it is such a punch in the gut when you think your track is popping off and the next day you check Spotify artists and all the plays are fake.
Then having to contact Spotify worrying the whole time your music is going to be removed this isn’t even fun anymore
Thanx for the insight on this. I was wondering how these random uploads happen to bands‘ accounts. And it’s absolutely mindblowing that bands don’t have control over what can be uploaded to their accounts. 🤯
An Artist by the name of Rain Paris has an Album on her profile called Relaxing Ocean Ambient. Funny thing is, she's never released an Album. She only releases Singles/EPs and the Album itself is under a Label that she's not normally under. The Album has 30 songs in it and I believe has been up for a few days. There needs to be more Safeguards for Artists!
Great video!
Thanks for shedding some light on this.
Streaming services have been corrupt for a very long time, especially Spotify. It has been rife with Bots, Stream Farms and fake, so-called "noise" tracks pratically since its inception. This AI stuff is just another example how they've failed to control thir platform.
I'm an artist but not in music. Drawing and digital painting. This topic has been going on for while already and a lot of artists are protesting against AI. Because oh boy... People posting AI art while claiming it would be handdrawn stuff, making tons of money. Stealing peoples artist identities, making money in their name. Or just training an AI to replicate someones entire style, which they're developed over years of practice. Their skill, craftsmanship, suddenly without value from one day to the next. Most of it isn't even illegal. A lot of sites and social medias themselves now have policies that they're allowed to use any uploaded pictures from users to train their own AI. It's a huge mess.
this is insane and with 100,000 songs being uploaded DAILY to spotify - it's an absolute mess
I don't like AI in music especially using the voice dead artists like hearing Chester Bennington singing the Evanescence song My Immortal or Freddie Mercury singing the A-ha song take on me, I find it creepy in so many ways
I'm surprised it's taken people this long to start uploading to other artist's pages, when I started distributing my band's music to Spotify I noticed how easy it would be immediately.
This explains why a band like acceptance I followed in high school (pop punk emo) is releasing mumble rap on Spotify. Absurddddddd
That's weird that you talk about AI because last thursday, i have talked about the danger of AI inside the metal music because tons of peoples does complete albums made only by AI when the real artists works hard to built song, lyrics, albums and they dont made lots of money outside touring and maybe merch, in my side, this AI album could kill metal or other music style in the future.
I don't think AI is going to kill off any music genre. It's not like real artists will disappear and all you're going to get is AI music. But it will be used for a lot of things, and lately it's been being used for a lot of not so great things.
Blame the generic pseudocore and powernintendo bands and the fact how easy it is for AI to regurgitate that crap.
No AI will ever be able to imitate bands like Savatage, Manilla Road, Fates Warning, Crimson Glory, Cirith Ungol etc
@@TankTheTech What AI will do great damage to is stuff like production/sync music, where music has to be tailor made to a given scenario and edited a certain way - there will be a lot of companies with low standards who'll just opt to Suno together something garbage instead of paying a production music studio - same way image synthesizers were hurting newspaper illustrators or LLMs are hurting people writing stuff like product descriptions and manuals.
And gosh udio make outstanding metal songs. This gonna destroy music itself.
@@Vivaildi Udio's making outstanding metal songs? I dont even wanna know what shlock you're listening to.
Two things to add from my own experience:
1. I am getting spammed with AI Music Maker programs on UA-cam lately which is kinda worrying.
2. The uploads on other spotify accounts has been a major topic in some Jpop/Vocaloid circles. E.g. the band Vivid Bad Squad from a Vocaloid mobile game had (on more than one occasion) russian songs uploaded to their page.
Honestly, glad this is finally being covered by someone bigger because, for a good few of the smaller hardcore/screamo artists I see, I keep seeing fake AI songs getting uploaded. Really annoying cause I just want new music from the artists. There isn’t even a way to report these AI songs from a listener/fan
getting uploaded to their profile, or just being uploaded in general?
@@dprice2800 Uploaded to their profiles. Like, AI music on the profile of a real artist
I think the internet is broken in general. I work in marketing and control a number of Google Business accounts, and it's amazing how easy it is for third parties to upload photos, change information, and more. It's a constant battle. So, the lack of safeguards does not surprise me. There definitely should be safeguards, but I fear that will require legislation, and I have little confidence that will happen.
My guess is why we see all this now is because off Spotify new rule that you have to have x amount of streams before you get paid. So now the AI farmers need to get a "real artist" on Spotify.
The Spotify situation is just stupid. How hard is it to just send an email to a registered address by the verified artists asking "hey, your profile has a new song, do you confirm"? People have invented things like two-factor authentication and it doesn't even have to be that complex. Just the "trust me bro" approach is very amateurish for a business that operates with so much money.
This is why bands should not care if they have 2k streams or 2 million streams. How many of these artists are faking it? more than we think. It's so sad that labels, managers, etc care about numbers when it can all be faked.
I do wonder to what extent it's illegal to use bots to generate clicks on your own songs? Is there actual legislation about it? Because otherwise they could have a hard time convicting him.
"We know that what you did was wrong, but it's not illegal"...
I don’t think there’s legislation for any ai stuff yet. The law is consistently behind technology, it seems
I don't think you need any special legislation for that. If they can prove it was his AI bots boosting the stream statistics of AI songs he uploaded to extract royalties from streaming services then its fraud, plain and simple. If he wouldn't have collected royalties then it maybe is just unethical to boost your steam stats. But he did so its fraud. All this is my opinion, of course.
View botting is against the T.O.S. for UA-cam. I don't know about Spotify or similar.
@@35milesofleadview botting may be “against the TOS,” but there’s no way you can look at the sheer volume of actual bots on any given video and not think UA-cam’s fully aware of the view botting situation. That’s the issue here- companies take in revenue hand over fist for fake engagement, which is why they all allow it to continue.
@BasedHyperborean I don't spend a huge amount of time in the comments, but I have seen the bots and scam giveaways.
All I can say on the matter is I have looked into and partially subscribe to the dead internet theory.
This happened to us last month, and Spotify took our new release down for suspicious activity. It’s back up now, weeks later, but man what a massive pain in the ass.
Make Them Suffer is now a new victim.
The problem is not AI per sea, it is the fact that you can upload to someone else's channel without going through an authentication process (what good does it do to have a password to your account if someone can pretend to be you?).
I remember some random person making random crappy music was uploading music pretending to be the band Allister and this was maybe 8 years ago. A couple of months ago someone did this to Jack Off Jill and there was other artists I know that had this happen. It was extremely hard for these bands to get Spotify to remove them despite complaints from the bands and dozens of fans. I think they need to find a way to prevent this.
Ok as a combat vet, military person I wrote a lot of fkd up shit and it’s been in a notebook for 30 years… I have a good ear but no musical talent so I have been inputting my lyrics into AI and to me the songs are amazing.. I’m not hiding the fact that I use Ai or trying to scam anyone.. why shouldn’t I be allowed to share my music? It’s no different than me writing a song and selling it .. Elvis was the first AI fraud because he never wrote a single song in his life.. he just sang what others gave him..
This is great. I bet these are going to be awesome.
@@dprice2800 I don’t care if they suck, I do it for me.. I only share to see if anyone happens to like them.. lol.. check out The Fungi Files on your favorite music channel..
this also happened to a bunch of Power Metal bands last month, Dragonland put out a statement
Seeing some AI doing song covers of the new Linkin Park like Chester was still singing for the band . The emptyness machine have many AI covers
Would love to see what Unleash The Archers has to say about this, y'know, given their last album.
I remember my 'What's new' feed being full of different metalcore artists, but with the same cover art from these ai generated songs. It was very strange. Went to go check if some of artists spoke up about it, and some did as mentioned in the video above. AI can definitely be scary when used with malicious intent.
Small bands are going to be the most affected by this stuff, that's why my content focuses on indie bands/artists....I saw a video on Rick Beato's channel where he called out a guy who called himself artist and wrote him an email saying he had a hit song that he had done with AI... WTF??? There are some people out there making hundreds of songs just with a prompt, upload them to Spotify and make money with it. It's a numbers games. If you can't get enough plays as a true artist, upload thousands of songs that just with a few plays may generate some cash... Yes, the system is broken left and right.
It's a tool. Don't see any issue with it, just like most of the music You listen to has either "electronic" or noninstrument parts included, and sometimes it isn't even the actual artists that record them. It will weed itself, because just because you post something doesn't mean it's going to get heard, if it's shit, not going to do well, if it has some legs and people like it then it deserves to be heard. The cream will ALWAYS rise to the top, shit will always collect at the bottom, well, I mean most of today's music is pretty much just that so I guess it's a wake up call, make better music.
AI art isn't. We need a new word to describe "art" which is made (plagiarized) by AI, so we don't confuse it with the act of a genuine human artist creating art.
I’ve thought about this a lot, and to me, it’s any human to medium connection. AI isn’t a medium (medium in this sense being stylus to iPad, ink to paper, oil to canvas and so on) basically the artists very own hand and mind to… creation whatever it may be from a drawing to sculpture. AI makes zero real connection so there ya go.
Make Them Suffer just had an ai song added to their page on Spotify, this really is getting out of hand.
This AI business is getting out of hand. I made a post promoting an upcoming EP and the comments were flooded with "it's AI!" and "you guys got scammed!" I know my artist did not sell me AI art but it bothers me that we've come to that point.
Isn't there talk about Spotify most likely using AI generated music in their own playlists as well? Chill guitar instrumentals and such? Because it is full of unknown artists that ahve like one song and that one song is in one or multiple Spotify playlists? Of course, Spotify could have just hired a session musician to do the same, but it all seems like a suspect way to not pay royalities.
same thing happened with trivium on spotify, went to download ascendancy special edition and there were like 4-5 non trivium songs on it lmao
The Thumbnail xD Pls don't change it! Make it meme!
I just watched this to be like, oh.. well…duh… 🤭
But yep. I enjoy watching your opinions. Welcome back to earth brother. Keep up the good work. 👍🏼
Looked at my Spotify New Releases section this morning, like I do every Friday morning, and got super excited when I saw Witchcraft pop up. But then I saw the artwork and quickly realized it was a fraudulent AI upload. This is only going to get worse.
So when I had Ozzy’s “Mr. Crowley” queued up on Spotify, the same one that had been saved on My List for years, and when the lyrics came in instead of Ozzy I heard some loser voice from “JuntunenPHD”, that was this too?
The song had the original cover art from “The Essential Ozzy Osborne” album, led back to that album, but played the other “band’s” song.
A point about AI, I don't think you can file copyright on anything AI generated at the moment. I might be mistaken but last I saw anything AI generated is open source and can be used for anything at any time. So all of these songs can be downloaded and placed anywhere by anyone as well.
Also many AI programs a extremely predatory and in the digital image world they have used a lot of copyrighted material to generate their algorithms without any form of permissions.
Adobe is losing customers because they now have a clause in their TOS which gives them unlimited rights to your content if you use any of their programs, which includes being sent to 3rd party companies.
eh you have to be careful with that cause if the lyics were written, that is copyrightable, also people are creating stems, separating them, recording those that they can and remixing, so you can play that game and might end up in some legal trouble, and not to mention things other things that can be easily done to proof first creation and ownership.
I've always just assumed labels have been using bots to bump their streams for many years already.
That's why youtube music has comments turned off for people who use it through the regular, non pay youtube service.
There was a spell where you would even see some variation of the comment "this is my dad's music" "my dad liked this music". You can even find some videos still up that are separate from youtube music that still have these kinds of comments.
It was 100 percent bots juicing the streams.
It's a numbers game, they did it already in the '50s, nothing new. If the game x=x+1, we're hardwired to do anything to add that 1, honesty comes second if not even last. Streaming just made it worse. If you had to buy your digital download (and then listen how many times you like), you'd have to shelve out lots of money to boost your own sales or find a way to boost those numbers without real spending. With streams, it's like taking candy from a child.
So someone can generate a falling in reverse song and upload it on Sebastian Bach Page. Wild 😂 thanks for bringing this up
huh that explains my release radar page on spotify lately. I removed bands from it thinking they went the lazy route of generating AI songs, but their pages being hijacked makes sense
AI, bots, artificial streams...all that needs to go. My first EP, which I spent 6 months working on, got pulled from Spotify. They accused me of "artificial streaming," but I didn't do anything of the sort. I never paid a promoter, or anyone else, for that matter, to add my music to a playlist or even promote it. Yet, somehow, this still happened. There's times when my numbers spike on Spotify, but then they drop back off. It seems like they just don't believe that an independent artist who doesn't promote himself could legitimately get that many streams. I'm surprised they haven't pulled my latest single yet because it's already approaching 2,400 streams in just over a year 😅
I hope your friend wasnt mad at you, this was way too important :)
First time I saw this was about 3 years ago and Behemoth had a whole album of circus music uploaded to their page. It was bizarre and when I went to show someone a couple days later it was gone.
Saw this happen to Twin Temple, it was a "remix" and it sounded god awful, it only stayed up for about 24 hours but i ended up downloading it before it got taken down just because of how ridiculous it sounded
Daniel Ek as one example doesn’t give a fuck about any artist only revenue. That’s why there’s no safeguards
Bingo! I've been saying this for ages: anyone with a veeeeeery basic IT and development knowledge can see that the system is flawed to the core, and solving these issues takes very little time for any decent developer, the same goes for the payment processors involved. The fact that you can claim any profile, and consequently upload (via a distributor, mind you, not directly) speaks volume about what they care about. The fact that the guy made over $10 million, show this went on for a long while. If it takes you that long to see someone is demolishing your house brick by brick, you shouldn't be allowed to have a house in the first place.
The whole world is held together with spit, it's a miracle we are still alive.
I've been following this story for the last week and Tank got a hold of it and did this piece.
Does anyone else who is aware of this story think that the dude didn't do anything wrong?
This dude created a system that exploited something in the system and made money from it.
NO ONE WAS HURT. NO SINGLE ARTIST WAS DAMAGED BY IT, NOT EVEN FINANCIALLY.
Spotify was the only one that lost something because they thought the guy was making more money than he ought to be making AND that it was Spotify that was paying for it.
There are no laws for it because it hasn't happened yet until now but there will probably be a law for it because the fucking streaming company will pay lawyers and the court system to make it so.
If the bandit streamer genius goes to jail for it, then it will be made an example by Spotify and other streaming services to not fuck with their money.
And so about money...anyone paying attention to the streaming space knows that Spotify is one of the most fucked up places to put your stuff on because the payout is fucking dogshit AND they limited when you actually get paid with some arbitrary metric that many streamers cannot achieve (you must have 1000 something in order to be paid). We all saw it to be another greedy play and this streamer bandit dude is basically doing ju-jitsu on their technology to make the most out of the exploit. I think it's just desserts for Spotify and hopefully this guy took his earnings and invested it in shit that will keep him comfortable for the rest of his life.
The guy did the work, created a snazzy workflow to make the bucks, and Spotify called him out on it.
Here's the thing: there are others. There are probably others who made more than this guy and other systems working on multiple accounts to generate more money that this dude. Catching this one guy is an attempt to set an example of hackers who fuck with them. It's a warning...LOL.
Spotify just wants to keep making money and screwing artists. Spotify is not the good guys here. This guy scammed a scammer company and I don't think he did anything wrong. He was clever and brilliant.
That's some scary shit. As if bands aren't up against it enough as it is, these days.
I saw this action on stream, and I can confirm that placing a song takes about 10 minutes, as Tank said. Spotify should be better in protecting content creators.
This AI stuff is truly getting out of hand and i hate it. That one weird record that got released about a month ago was bonkers. Its been since taken down thankfully. A few bands i know it happened to were Make Them Suffer and Brand Of Sacrifice, it happened to many more but those are the two bands i have saved that it happened to. It was some wacky AI instrumental metal. This whole album shit was taken down hours after being uploaded. I was concerned for MTS because the song sounded sorta like their music, i was also concerned about BOS, but not as much only because the AI track vs their actual music was like trying to put a plane in a car dealership and sell it as a car. It was that obvious. Which was good, but i know several other bands that also had this issue that didnt get away so easily. Im afraid that somehow some AI deathcore is gonna get uploaded one day if it hasnt already and tear apart everything.
I’ve seen this happen like 6 times to RED , every time it was like super hardcore gangster rap
It is very strange that when you choose an artist that's already been claimed, it doesn't hold the submission for review and notify the owner of that artist profile. Like it's not just AI, I've seen small artists with the same name get legitimately mixed up, but like, our profile can likely be traced back to our email on the backend, so it makes sense to confirm that it is or isn't us trying to upload music from a different account. Surely, once the music is submitted to streaming platforms, the systems can recognize that the uploaders are different and will push out a notification to the proper artist.
AI is scary, it desperately needs to be regulated.
You can't even log in directly into spotify and such to upload music. You have to do it through one of these 3rd party distributors.
@@EwanMarshall Correct, I've been using Distrokid for years. And while you don't log in to upload music, you do log in to Spotify, Apple Music, etc. to manage your artist profile. If that artist profile has already been claimed, edited, and had music submitted to, then distributors and streaming platforms should be working in tandem to make sure that your profile remains yours so that this can't happen.
There is a super interesting german docu series called "Dirty Little Secrets" that came out last year. In Episode 2 they focus on how the music industry itself is gaming the system. F.e. the publisher holds the rights to lets say "crazy train" by ozzy and then they go to some musicians they have on retainer and let them change the song to like a music box style. Then they put in on "sleep" and "meditation" playlists that they themselves own and rake in millions of streams. Not illegal, but still fucked up. They are taking money from real artits the way the Spotify payout system works. Also if they are doing it this way until now, it would be naive to think they won't switch to AI and get that nonsense music for free.
Spotify have been doing a horrendous job protecting the integrity of their artists for a very long time now. While AI is unbelievably predatory & intrusive, I think Spotify deserves a lot of flak for allowing these songs to make it onto official artist feeds in the first place. Not too long ago there was the "Sped Up" & "Slowed Down" trend where 'fans' were uploading personal edits to a band's official feed, and we've had unrelated artists using established bands for collab credits for pretty much as long as I can remember.
It needs to be significantly more difficult to upload and authorize a track for an artist. They've had multiple opportunities to look towards their own system and try to fix it to avoid something like this from happening, but I suppose they're just going to look the other way until it escalates to a point where it starts to potentially impact them for a change.
The AI Chester version of the new linkin park song is so weird and wrong
YEEEES! its disgusting
This is sad man. With all the advances in technology yet can’t catch this. Yikes. Side note. New WhiteChapel slaps harder than anything they’ve put out before
I have never been a friend of artificial intelligence and never will be. It was perfectly clear that if you give mankind such a powerful tool, it will be used to do things that are not legal or to harm other people.
Regardless of the fact that I have seen Terminator.
What I've also noticed now is that there are an incredible number of hip-hop songs on UA-cam that have been mixed together with AI from various other songs and then marketed as the new release of 2024.
Artificial intelligence has created a huge problem for itself by releasing it for humanity.
Apart from the fact that it will kill us at some point anyway, as I said. Terminator. 😅
That is insane it is allowed to happen. You think the artist would have control over their own page and would have to authorize songs. Streaming has devalued physical music so much and we have gone to far that we can not go back to mostly physical music. Lars was right
Unfortunately, taking over someone else's Spotify profile isn't just about AI songs. Even real artists some time ago released music by featuring well-known artists who never took part, simply a mean way to get noticed.
Great video 🤘
Looking sharp with the short beard, man
It does suck that theres no way to prevent people from doing this, but at least theyre getting caught and in trouble. Id be 10x more worried if they were caught but legally didnt do anything wrong. It just sucks in general the amount of people that only see music as a means to an end, not a form of art. Music is magic, not a fast cash heist.
I hope this changes sooner than later
8:14 It's like clicking the big green "I AM OVER 18" button on a porn site 😂
Yeah it's not to protect you, it's to protect them - same way when you enter the US you have to fill a form that you're not a terrorist.
This has been a problem even way before AI started getting so prevalent. I've had to deal with this issue time and time again with my band. Honestly I feel as if an artist should get a code attached to their profile and only the people with access to that code can upload to said profile.
Torn a bit here - making this common knowledge and spreading it seems important, and puts pressure on the industry to change something. But at the same time, right now they haven't changed it, so people watching this might get some really stupid ideas (you know, stupid people do stupid things). Kinda similar to how hackers often report exploits to the company itself first, in the style of "fix this asap before I publish this". Though obviously those companies have to already know about it and better already be working on a solution...
Free my man. Fuck spotify. He played the system
Indiefy Music Distrubution and amuse Music Distrubution Those two apps tried to steal my music and It was a wicked pain in the ass to get it back.
AI songs uploaded as another artist is fraud. What the guy was doing was a huge grey area in relation to AI. What was wrong was using bots to up the streaming count. Not sure I would classify that as it being an AI issue (just that AI allowed him to create more songs that any other way) so AI added to it but wasn't really the part that was wrong. All just my .02 so take it at that.
On the flip side.
What is stopping a band from using AI to make a song? Maybe not upload it. But use it to build grooves, beats, lyrics, etc? Slightly tweaking it. Taking all the real creativity out and basically doing similar music. How many bands have not really adjusted a sound or lyric topic? Seems like an easy path of AI learning.
What if they like the AI made song so much that it's now just learning it to claim its actually their work?
As I've listened to what you had to say and it's really concerning. People like Michael Smith and what he did without any consideration, sadly this needed to happen otherwise who knows how many people did that previously!? And international law must have some thought about how it's going to be implemented, it can't just be U.S law or E. U law it must be for every country.
Was wondering what was going on with those songs/albums. "Feared" (ola englund)'s band had some weird album pop up the other day. Had a feeling this is what might have been happening, all about money.
i think something similar was there a few years ago with spotify, not with AI but someone who created songs and streamed the first 31seconds (min 30sec to get paid). and i think he lost.
EDIT it was in denmark, he made about 300.000 usd between 2013 and 2019 and was sent to 18 month in prison
I am surprised Spotify does not use AI detection software when music is being uploaded to their systems/servers. I have applied for software engineer jobs where they say if you AI to answer technical questions or complete code task on the application or second stage of the hiring process they'll use that software to make sure you have not cheated.
ai is not the issue it's the people doing things that are shady, which is almost impossible to stop, hence why you have grandma calling you in need of money, it's her voice, but it's a dude in a foreign country stealing your cash.
Unbelievable this is going on. But don't most metal bands on Spotify earn next to nothing from the service? Why would the AI scammers bother with metal bands. I know it would be obvious on the big pop acts accounts but they wouldn't get a lot from most metal bands
I directly want to rectify something: babymetal & electric calboy get a 50/50 split yes, BUT, thats after their labels take the biggest cut. Unless, both don’t have a label and hold all rights to the music themselves
Comedian and Data Scientist here. It's going to get way worse before it gets way better.
What it will take, sadly, will end up costing artists $ and be a whole new revenue scam for the government. But artists would generally need to register at a central 'music' agency, and all the releases tied to this registered ID (that they would need to prove somehow who they are @ registration). All their songs uploaded to the various music outlets would need registry validation as well. And this being a new set of laws means the government will charge for overseeing the whole thing even if they are not the ones maintaining the 'registry' information.
The 2nd thing will annoy humans using music services (and/or social media) bots can be mostly thwarted by deploying a 'prove you are human' authentication. AI, and dumb bots especially, cannot do human things yet. Mainly b/c this is not true 'AI' but human-coded pattern matching on top of a 'large language' data model. But that would mean every 'listen'/like/etc. would stop and go 'prove you are human'. And be updated when coders determine how to get around that new 'proof' methodology.
This is just insane. I play around with AI music and am in the process of putting together an album of AI music. I don't expect to make money off of it, I just want to share what the AI creates. But it's scary just how easy people can use the same tools for shit like this.
Spotify appears to have a problem in general with uniquely identifying artists. For instance, if you go to The Warning’s artist page, after all of the normal listings you will see links for some punk rock collections, apparently because of some previous punk band that used the same band name (band names are often recycled inadvertently). My guess is that Spotify is just using the band name to make this link. Maybe the platform’s design is broken in some way. As a software developer I can tell you that if you mess something up at that level it can be incredibly hard to fix.
I suspect they have an unique identifier for the band The Warning consisting of three sisters from Monterey Mexico. BUT when as a user you do the query for The Warning it is going to generate a page using the style for the current The Warning but also including all the songs etc for the Warning that would include the old bands songs. It was sloppy software engineering that has been paved over by a thousand updates to the software. As you pointed, extremely hard to fix at this point. It essentially would require a rewrite of that part of the software. Now the difficult question- will they spend the money to fix this problem. Probably not until it begins to cost THEM money.
@@scottwheeler2494 Tidal also seems to identify song authors by only their name, so it can show incorrect listings for a songwriter. That’s a bit less of an issue I guess but I don’t know if they do better for band names. And you are right they won’t fix anything unless it affects the bottom line.
@@markjames8664 it's funny. I would have been identifying by tax payer ID from the start. That's the one that counts... who gets paid. Then create an alias tied to the EIN. But I always worked in finance systems so that is my bias. It would be easy to keep the BS out then. The bands and or publishers would do it since a wrong EIN would mean someone besides them would be getting paid. But regardless, we have already established they failed in their engineering.
I caught on to the scam very quickly because some bands like Born of Osiris had an AI single uploaded literally a day or 2 after they released an official single from an upcoming album. And then you scroll down the page on Spotify and look at the producer info and the names are literal gibberish.
Yeah I was kind of afraid this would happen. For some time I would get Eastern European rap acts playing while listening to Spotify and when I would look at what the hell was going on I noticed they all had names of punk bands and hardcore punk bands. At first I kind of dismissed it, thinking Terror is a name that more people would use. But at some point they just had the more out there hardcore band names as their artist name. That is when I figured they abused the system, just to upload under someone else's name, didn't have to pay to get on spotify and could just take the revenue.
Probably also because many of those bands would be too small for Spotify to care