The dark side of music streaming
The podcast describes how a guy called Michael Smith was charged with fraud for this type of activity last year. [2] Some people estimate as much as 10% of Spotify royalties are fraudulent.
I first noticed the weird phenomenon of loads of (short) similar songs by multiple fake artists on Spotify back in 2018. Robin Sloan wrote about his discovery of fake similar music [3] and put together a playlist of some of these nearly identical songs [4].
If you make a new playlist from Robin's playlist and then check out the songs that Spotify recommends based on what's in the playlist you will find tons of slight variations of the same (rather annoying) tune, mostly 47 seconds long. I got up to 79 tracks of basically the same music snippet, each with its own artist, album/song title and artwork.
Many of these songs have 100,000 - 200,000 plays, so you can see how Michael Smith could be generating millions of dollars by uploading thousands of AI-generated songs every week.
So Spotify can obviously identify these very similar songs, because they recommend them for adding to a playlist of the songs. And if you play one of the songs Spotify will recommend similar artists who are fake artists with versions of the same song.
So why hasn't Spotify removed these songs? It must be reasonably easy for them to identify suspicious activity. Robin's blog post came out years ago.
One other story that gives nuance to the fake music scandal is the Swedish artist who makes millions of dollars in royalty by producing large quantities of mood music under many different aliases. Johan Röhr is one of the top artists on Spotify with billions of streams [5].
BBC program Blurb: In September last year, musician Michael Smith of North Carolina was charged with stealing millions from music streaming services. The US Department of Justice has accused him of using artificial intelligence tools and thousands of bots to fraudulently stream songs billions of times - taking millions of dollars of royalties which otherwise would have been paid to real artists. The case has been labelled as ‘unprecedented’ and ‘the first of its kind’. But could fraud on music streaming services actually be much more prevalent than any of the platforms let on? BBC Trending speaks to music industry insiders, and those fighting back against streaming fraud.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5y9t
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/09/05/michael-smith-ai-music-arrested/75086815007/
[3] https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/visions/#spotify
[4] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2IaWgbhpPbS3Z9DYgf1rqg
[5] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/who-is-the-swedish-musician-wh-q0cKLbkzRkqaSEUZZv_4IQ