Folks who know me understand I listen to a lot of Squeeze.
A few years ago, I noticed a surprise new track in my Apple Music library, but I knew right away it wasn’t by a band that’s been around for about as long as I’ve been alive. An artist uploaded tracks under the name Squeeze, oblivious to the prior band’s history or their own run-in with American trademark law.
Days later, those tracks disappeared, re-filed under a modified artist name. It seemed weird, I thought at the time, that anyone with a music distribution account can just upload a track under an existing band’s name and the services just assume they’re telling the truth. It’s a litigious industry, I guess, and fair to assume that a band’s management or label would handle any kind of incursion.
Emanuel Maiberg broke a new version of this story in 404 Media’s newsletter: he spent $3.75 on a digital distribution account, typed in the name of a real Brooklyn punk band, and had an AI-generated song live on their verified Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal pages within a day.
As before, nobody at the distributor or the streamers checked a single box he ticked.
So many of these tools were developed at a time when the barriers to this kind of activity were so high, it was unreasonable to expect anyone would actually do this. But AI cheap music distribution tools make it nearly trivial for someone to hijack another artist’s account.
Spotify seems like it’s first out of the gate with some tools for artists to claim their profile. (This is the same service notorious for serving up “soundalike” acts to replace artists who don’t want to be on the platform.)
Could a scam “artist” get away with jamming a fake album into a catalog and actually getting paid? Maybe, but only with a few layers of identity theft and compromised bank accounts, unless they’re desperate to get caught. I think it’s much more likely that someone tries this to either get their own music noticed by fans, or worse: dumping an embarrassing recording long enough for an artist’s reputation to get damaged on social media.