Fake Releases on Verified Pages

In late 2024, Spotify listeners began noticing something odd. A new album would appear on the page of a familiar artist, complete with the artist's name and a blue verification check, but the music inside had nothing to do with them. One listener saw a HEALTH album on a new release radar, except the cover art looked wrong. The album was not by HEALTH. It was AI-generated slop uploaded to the band's official artist page.

That was not an isolated incident. Over a single weekend, three fake albums appeared under HEALTH's name before eventually being removed. The next weekend, a new Annie album showed up. It seemed more plausible because Annie had just released a single called 'The Sky Is Blue,' but the track list did not include it. Playing the album revealed birdsong and vaguely New Age instrumentals. It did not sound like Annie.

Similar fakes hit Standards, a band with a verified page. A fake album posted on September 26 lingered for weeks. The band's lead songwriter and guitarist, Marcos Mena, emailed Spotify to report the mistake. Two weeks later, on October 8, he received a response: 'It looks like the content is mapped correctly to the artist's page. If you require further assistance, please contact your music provider. Please do not reply to this message.' As of November 8, the fake Standards album was still sitting under the band's verified name. It was finally removed by November 11.

'That was upsetting to me, because if you have ears, you can definitely hear it's not our music,' Mena said. 'It's definitely a bummer because we did have a new album come out this year, and I feel like it's detracting from that.' He worried that a new fan who saw Standards open for another band might check them out on Spotify and find the fake album instead.

Months of Targeted Uploads

The problem had been growing for months. Metalcore acts such as Caliban, Northlane, and Silent Planet were targeted. So were artists with single-word names: Swans, Asia, Standards, and Gong. In each case, a new album would appear under the artist's name with no resemblance to their actual music. Sometimes the fakes vanished after a few days. Other times they stayed indefinitely, even against the artist's will.

Earlier attempts focused on metalcore musicians like Fit for an Autopsy, Alpha Wolf, and Like Moths to Flames. Those also looked like a coordinated attempt to siphon off legitimate streams. According to reporting, the culprit in that case was Vibratech Musicians.

The Honor System Behind Streaming Distribution

To understand how this happens, it helps to know how streaming distribution works. Artists do not log into Spotify and upload albums directly. They go through a distributor that handles licensing, metadata, and royalty payments. Distributors send songs and metadata in bulk to streaming services. Metadata includes the song title and artist name, but also songwriter, record label, and other details. That information is crucial for artists and rights holders to get paid.

But the process effectively runs on an honor system. A distributor takes an uploader at their word that they are who they say they are. Spotify takes the distributor at its word. The result is a fake album on a real artist's page. Most of the time, such mistakes are honest errors. In the recent wave of fakes, however, artists appear to be directly targeted.

Because streaming royalties flow through the distributor, a fake album can reward someone other than the real artist. The real Standards are on Topshelf Records. The fake album appeared to be on something called Gupta Music. That means Standards' actual label was not getting a cut. If enough people streamed the fake, royalties would go to Gupta Music, along with payouts from hundreds of other releases full of slop.

A search on Every Noise at Once, an encyclopedia of Spotify's catalog, showed more than 700 releases under Gupta Music. The cover art looked remarkably similar and smacked of AI generation. The purported band names were mostly one word: 'Rany,' 'Living,' 'Bedroom,' and 'Culture.' The albums shared names with the faux bands. A search for 'Gupta Music' returned only a 14-year-old TED Talk by a man named Robert Gupta.

The label name itself seemed suspicious. There is a well-known marketing agency called Gupta Media, which represents entertainment companies including Disney Music Group, Republic Records, and Sony Music. A spokesperson for Gupta Media confirmed the agency 'has no connection' to Gupta Music. 'To be clear, Gupta Media is not now nor have we ever been involved in any of the activity you're addressing — i.e., uploading fake music by fake artists to the profiles of real artists,' the spokesperson said.

Spotify later confirmed that the onslaught of AI garbage came from one source: the licensor Ameritz Music. Ameritz Music did not respond to a request for comment. Spotify said it ended its relationship with the licensor. 'Due to significant and repeated violations of Spotify's Metadata Style Guide, we ended our relationship with the licensor that provided the content in question,' said Chris Macowski, Spotify's global head of music communication. 'As a result, the content was removed from our platform.' Macowski also said Spotify 'invests heavily in automated and manual reviews' to prevent royalty fraud.

The Economics of Streaming Fraud

Why would anyone do this? The answer is almost always money. Individual payouts for a single stream are tiny, as legitimate musicians frequently complain. But hundreds or thousands of songs with relatively modest streaming numbers can add up to big payouts. A fraudster just has to upload music and find a way to make accounts play it. And this does not only happen on Spotify. There are more than 100 streaming platforms where artists can run this scam.

In early November, Universal Music Group sued the music distributor Believe and its US subsidiary TuneCore. UMG alleged that Believe had a 'conscious business strategy of indiscriminately distributing and purporting to license tracks with full knowledge that many of the clients of its distribution services are fraudsters.' The lawsuit is about copyright infringement, and its details are striking. UMG alleged that artists such as 'Kendrik Laamar,' 'Arriana Gramde,' 'Jutin Biber,' and 'Llady Gaga' were among those Believe uploaded, suggesting a strategy of capturing streams from users who had simply typoed.

Another strategy involves AI covers of popular songs placed on popular playlists so normal listeners will stream them. Another uses bots to 'listen' to songs. Earlier this year, a Danish man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using bots to get about $300,000 in royalties. Another man, Michael Smith, was arrested and charged with defrauding streaming services out of $10 million over seven years. Smith allegedly used AI tools to create hundreds of thousands of songs under fake artist names such as 'Calm Baseball,' 'Calm Connected,' and 'Calm Knuckles.' He then streamed the catalog using bots billions of times, prosecutors said. That diverted money that should have gone to real musicians. Spotify paid only $60,000 to Smith, suggesting protective measures limited payments, Macowski said.

'People upload massive amounts of albums that are intended to be streaming fraud albums,' said Andrew Batey, CEO of Beatdapp, a company that aims to prevent streaming fraud. Batey estimated that $2 billion to $3 billion is stolen from artists through this kind of fraud every year.

Distribution plays a big role. Most distributors' business models are based on getting a cut of whatever royalties come back to artists and labels. 'Even though they may not be participating in the fraud, they directly benefit from it,' Batey said. In its suit, UMG alleged that Believe 'wrongfully collects royalties it knows are properly payable by digital music services' such as UMG on copyrighted material.

A sophisticated fraud operation will use multiple fake labels and multiple distributors to avoid a single point of failure. Besides bot accounts, some bad actors have access to real people's compromised accounts. 'They log in as you and me, play their song three times and leave,' Batey said. That fake stream is then hidden among all the real listening the real account is doing.

Gupta Music was not the only label found doing bulk uploading. There were three more doing something similar: Future Jazz Records, Ancient Lake Records, and Beat Street Music. All had uploaded hundreds of albums with AI-looking album art. It is unclear how these labels intended to generate streams, if at all. By the time of publication, most of those albums had been removed.

Metadata Problems and Moderation Gaps

Problems with metadata have existed for years, some innocent and some considerably less so. 'We've basically gotten lucky so far,' said Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify employee who runs Every Noise at Once. 'The content validation system without any input on the artist level is fairly crazy.'

When something goes wrong, there are two levels where it can be addressed: the streaming service and the distributor. Distributors have to strike a delicate balance. They make money by taking a cut of streaming payouts. If they police uploads too aggressively, legitimate artists get caught. Fixing that is expensive, and distribution is a low-margin, bulk business, McDonald said. But allowing too many junk bands through creates problems with streaming services.

Streaming services usually have data that could allow them to sort this out. If, for instance, the distributor that usually uploads an artist's albums is not the one used for a new album, that could flag the release for review. A change in label could also be a signal. McDonald said he also built tools for Spotify to identify when a song does not sound like the rest of an artist's catalog. Sometimes that can happen for legitimate reasons; an EDM remix of an Ed Sheeran song is not going to sound like Ed Sheeran, but it may still have happened with the label's and artist's approval.

Some legitimate artists share the same name, especially tiny indie bands, and they simply have separate pages. 'The way it should have worked, getting the plumbing right, is that all those albums should have been flagged as new artists, and then it wouldn't matter,' McDonald said.

AI as an Accelerant, Not the Root Cause

Besides, AI is just an accelerant for a type of fraud that has lived on Spotify for years, Batey said. Fraudsters used to dig up old, obscure albums and digitize them or slightly alter a song that already existed. AI has cut down the amount of work required to make the fake song needed to get streaming money.

At the same time, accelerants make things burn down faster. Plenty of platforms have become less useful as they have been choked with AI glurge, including Facebook, Instagram, the artist formerly known as Twitter, and even Google itself.

AI music poses the same threat to Spotify, McDonald said. He pointed out that a listener might be waiting for an Annie album, excited for it, and then instead get duped into garbage. 'There's all these mechanisms around assuming this stuff is correct,' he said. But right now, those mechanisms are broken, and people who truly care, like artists themselves, do not have their hands on the controls.

Just banning AI-generated content from Spotify or distributors might feel like an intuitive solution. But despite the backlash against AI-generated media, there are legitimate AI-generated songs. For instance, '10 Drunk Cigarettes,' from Girly Girl Productions, is something of a hit. It also is likely human-assisted, rather than wholly AI-generated. UMG has made a deal with Soundlabs to allow artists to use Soundlabs' AI vocals for themselves. It has also partnered with Klay Vision to create a model for generating music.

As for the distributors, the thing to watch is UMG's lawsuit. A pretrial conference is scheduled for January. The outcome could change how distributors filter the music people try to upload through their platforms. If lawsuits are more expensive than content moderation, there is likely to be more content moderation. That could improve things for Spotify, which is downstream of the distributors.

Source:The Verge News