Spotify has more than 626 million users worldwide, but some of those listeners may be unknowingly listening to music by “fake” artists. The world’s largest music streaming platform is reportedly inundated with unlicensed cover versions of songs – many of them created by artificial intelligence. These songs are causing concern among some in the industry that Spotify’s problem with “fake” artists could be spiraling out of control.
The problem of fake artists on Spotify is not new. Back in 2016, there were reports that the platform was allegedly creating its own records under the names of people who didn’t even exist. But the recent rise of artificial intelligence seems to have taken the problem to an even bigger level.
What are these “fake artists”?
Recently, it was reported that “covers of popular songs were being inserted into large, publicly available playlists and hidden among dozens of other covers by real artists while amassing millions of listeners and getting paid for it,” according to Slate. The artists in question “all fit a certain pattern, with monthly listeners in the hundreds of thousands, zero social media presence, and some very ChatGPT-sounding bios.” Notably, none of these bands have originals on Spotify; instead, “a group might cover the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Third Eye Blind and then switch to ‘Linger’ by the Cranberries on the same record” and “if you didn’t think the song was about AI, you probably wouldn’t suspect anything.”
Subscribe The week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news and analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for the free weekly newsletter
From our morning news roundup to our weekly Good News newsletter, get the best of the week delivered straight to your inbox.
From our morning news roundup to our weekly Good News newsletter, get the best of the week delivered straight to your inbox.
Spotify refers to these artists as “content creators,” but that “could be pretty much anyone on the artist side – the ‘bands’ themselves, their management, the label,” according to Slate. Some in the industry suspect it could be “the third-party intermediaries that many artists use to upload and manage their music on streaming platforms,” Henderson Cole, an entertainment and music lawyer, told Slate.
The problem appears to be cross-genre. A group of Reddit users first discovered the AI songs in country music, but there is also a “broader, coordinated effort by individuals using AI to create and distribute instrumental music that imitates popular metalcore bands,” according to music magazine Idioteq. As with other genres, this is “likely a calculated attempt to steal streams from the followers of these legitimate artists, thereby generating revenue for the creators of these AI tracks.”
While it cannot be confirmed that all of these songs are the result of AI, many appear to be “similar versions of the same poorly produced piece of music, each differentiated by random pitch changes,” according to gaming and tech site Kotaku. These songs by “no-name artists have been shown to have striking similarities. They are clearly the same piece of music, starting the same way, using the same melodic motifs.” It seems this issue isn’t unique to Spotify either, as there is a “similarly weird thing happening on Apple Music… hundreds of classical recordings that have had their pitch changed and their metadata removed,” musician Zoë Keating said on X in 2023. The recordings are “all attributed to nonexistent artists.”
How does Spotify react?
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 misleading content policy, which prohibits identity fraud,” the company said in a statement to Slate. So stopping more such songs from being uploaded is a challenge.
“I don’t know how you legislate all of this,” Rick Beato, a musician, producer and YouTuber who has previously testified about AI copyrights in music, told Slate. Spotify could also “put both real and AI songs into playlists and collect listeners to keep a larger percentage of the royalties for themselves, thus maximizing profits.” So it “would really be an incentive for Spotify to control that against third parties because they want to be the ones doing it.”
