Spotify Has a Fake-Band Problem. It’s a Sign of Things to Come. (2024)

If you ask their shareholders, Spotify is in a great place right now. Ask anyone else, and it’s a mess of scams, tone-deaf CEO messaging, and lawsuits. One of the weirdest scams that recently came to light involves (what else) A.I.-generated content.

Here’s the gist: Covers of popular songs were being inserted into large, publicly available playlists, hidden among dozens of other covers by real artists while racking up millions of listens and getting paid.

The artists “performing” the covers—the Highway Outlaws, Waterfront Wranglers, Saltwater Saddles—all fit a certain pattern, with monthly listeners in the hundreds of thousands, zero social media footprint, and some very ChatGPT-sounding bios. A group of vigilante Redditors initially found the pattern in bands covering country classics, but a wider look showed that there were groups covering songs across decades and genres. None of the bands had originals, but a group might cover the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Third Eye Blind and then pivot to “Linger” by the Cranberries in the same record. If you didn’t think the song was A.I., you probably wouldn’t suspect a thing.

“Apparently this has been going on for several years, with ambient music and with electronic music and jazz,” said calibuildr, the Redditor who posted the initial thread on r/countrymusic and asked to be identified by their handle. “I think the new thing here is that with A.I. being this consumer product, anybody can make a thing with vocals now.”

A lawyer for 11A, the label claiming to be working with the artists involved in the thread, said their client is properly paying royalties and has documents that show the involvement of human musicians. He would not reply to further requests for comment and did not offer contact information for the label, the only trace of which is an expired domain and this 117-follower Facebook profile with the last post in 2021—not exactly congruent with the numbers its artists are doing online.

Either way, this whole situation shines a light on the murky argument over what to do with this brand of chicanery in the first place. Who should be the one to remove these songs? This time, it wasn’t Spotify.

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

“Content providers” could be pretty much anyone on the artist side of things—the “bands” themselves, their management, the label—but Henderson Cole, an entertainment and music lawyer, suspects it might be the third-party intermediaries many artists use to upload and manage their music across streaming platforms.

“I think whoever actually distributes this might be nervous about the reports on it and they might have taken it down,” he said. “People are finding better ways to exploit the streaming system, because technically, this isn’t streaming fraud. If they’re paying somebody to perform cover songs and then using covers to pull streams, that’s not illegal, it’s just exploitative.”

Figuring out who exactly is getting exploited here is another mess. (Hint: It’s always the artist.) Spotify doles out royalties from a pool of money, according to Cole, so if Post Malone got 1 percent of all the streams on Spotify this month, he (and his record label) would be owed 1 percent of that month’s royalties.

That would then be divided among the folks involved in creating his songs. For a cover song, that would include a cut for whoever’s being covered—but streaming services offer more of that cut to the song’s new performer and their label, rather than the original artist.

“A lot of people don’t realize this, but the government sets royalty rates and then these streaming companies negotiate with the labels, distributors, artists, songwriters, and everyone based on those royalty rates,” he said. “So the songwriters might be getting some money, but probably not as much as they would like, and I’m sure they don’t love that these crazy A.I. performances of their songs are out there.”

So, OK, maybe the government can get in there and sort things out?

“I don’t know how you legislate any of this stuff.” said Rick Beato, a musician, producer, and YouTuber who testified before a congressional committee about the intersection of A.I. and music in intellectual property, transparency, and copyright. “It became apparent to me when I was sitting there in this meeting that it was impossible to come up with a consensus on this.”

Instead, Beato believes Spotify itself is already in the game, slipping both real and A.I. songs into playlists and harvesting listens to keep a larger percent of the royalty pool for itself to maximize profits.

“So there would really be an incentive for Spotify to police that from third parties, because they want to be the ones doing it,” Beato said, taking up a version of the “Spotify was an inside job” theory that has been posited since 2017.

Still, the best way to support your favorite artist is to buy merch and go see them live. A.I. can’t fake that quite yet.