Ars Technica published a fascinating article about a bizarre thing that just keeps happening on Spotify that Spotify seems to do nothing about. The Spotify pages of real, well-known musical artists are getting filled with fake albums that those artists did not produce.
I encourage you to read the full article, but I’ll do my best to give you a quick summation to whet your appetite. A fan of the British psychedelic rock band Gong noticed that a new album was published on the band’s Spotify page. The fan also noticed that the album art was completely different from their usual trippy visuals and the songs themselves sounded nothing like them. A member of the band named Dave Stuart confirmed that the album was fake and that they were trying to get it removed.
This, it turns out, was not a one-off incident but rather a part of a larger ongoing trend of artists’ pages getting filled with albums they had nothing to do with. Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify data analyst, explained on Twitter/X that there are tons of obscure music labels out there that release albums filled with generic music that are all attributed to artists with one-word names, like Gong. Sometimes that generic (and let’s face it, probably AI-generated) music gets filed under the profiles of actual artists that share those names.
“Hey @Spotify, you got thousands of junk albums with real artist names from ‘Ancient Lake Records’, ‘Beat Street Music’ and ‘Gupta Music’ today,” he wrote, then linked to the spam listings.
Spotify has said that they are going to take down all of this shitty generic music that’s been filed away under the profiles of real artists, and possibly even take legal action against these uploaders—but they haven’t done it any of that yet, and seem to be taking their sweet time. Really, the only thing artists can do if they’ve had a fake album uploaded under their name is fill out a form and send it off to Spotify in the hopes that maybe one day they get around to clearing it off of their page.
The post Spotify Keeps Letting Fake Albums Appear on the Pages of Real Artists appeared first on VICE.
The post Spotify Keeps Letting Fake Albums Appear on the Pages of Real Artists appeared first on VICE.
