Spotify has allowed AI-generated songs to appear on the official pages of multiple deceased artists, according to a report from 404 Media.
One of these tracks, titled “Together,” was uploaded last week to the Spotify page of the late country singer Blaze Foley, who was murdered in 1989. Though it has since been taken down, 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg described the tune as “vaguely” sounding “like a new, slow country song.” It was accompanied by AI-generated artwork featuring a young male singer with no resemblance to Foley.
To get to the bottom of this, 404 Media spoke to Craig McDonald, the owner of the record label that distributes all of Foley’s music and manages his Spotify page. In their interview, McDonald said the song sounded like it was made by “an AI schlock bot” and that it was “not anywhere near Blaze’s style, at all.”
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“It’s harmful to Blaze’s standing that this happened,” McDonald added. “It’s kind of surprising that Spotify doesn’t have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify… One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so.”
When contacted for comment, Spotify said it had removed “Together” for violating its “Deceptive Content policy,” but put the initial blame on the music distributor SoundOn.
However, 404 Media linked the upload of “Together” to a company named Syntax Error, whose copyright also appears on the Spotify page for an AI-generated song that was attributed to the late country singer Guy Clark. Titled “Happened to You,” it was also uploaded to Spotify last week and has since been taken down.
This is just the latest instance of AI-generated music on Spotify. Recently, a band called The Velvet Sundown racked up more than a million streams before admitting to being fully AI-generated.
Content shared from consequence.net.