# Music Services Caught Streaming AI-Generated Albums Impersonating Real Singers
robot (spnet, 1) → All – 17:22:01 2025-08-24
The BBC reports a growing trend in music: "for established (but not superstar) artists to be targeted by fake albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services."
Even dead musicians have had AI-generated "new" material added to their catalogues... According to music industry analysts Luminate, about 99,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services every day, usually via dozens of distribution services, which ask the uploader to submit the artist's details. If that information is incorrect, and a song wrongly gets listed under an existing artist's name, it's down to them or their label to complain and get it removed.
Spotify took three weeks to remove fakes of folk singer/songwriter Emily Portman, according to the article, "and she still hasn't regained control of her Spotify artist profile... Considering how the streaming era has already made a big dent in many artists' incomes, Emily Portman says this affair has felt like a "very low blow"... She suspects independent artists are being targeted because star names have more protection and more power to get fraudulent releases removed swiftly."
But it's also happened to "a number of Americana and folk-rock artists who have had fake tracks posted using their names in recent weeks — apparently all from the same source," including Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, J Tillman (now known as Father John Misty), Sam Beam (aka Iron & Wine), Teddy Thompson and Jakob Dylan:
All the releases used the same style of AI artwork and were credited to three record labels, two with apparently Indonesian names. Many listed the same name as a songwriter — Zyan Maliq Mahardika. That name has also been credited on other songs mimicking real US Christian musicians and metalcore bands. Spotify said it had flagged the issue with the distributor and removed these tracks as they "violated our policy against impersonating another person or brand." It added it would "remove any distributor who repeatedly allows this type of content on our platform"....
Tatiana Cirisano from media and technology analysis company Midia Research says AI is "making it easier for fraudsters" to fool listeners, who are also more "passive" in the algorithmic age. She thinks bad actors posing as real-life artists are hoping their fraudulent tracks will "rack up enough streams" — hundreds of thousands — to earn them a nice payday. "I would think that the AI fakes are targeting lesser-known artists in the hopes that their schemes fly under the radar, compared to if they were to target a superstar who could immediately get Spotify on the line," she notes.
But streaming services and distributors are "working hard" and getting better at spotting it, she stresses, "ironically, also by using AI and machine learning!
[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/08/24/0413234/music-services-caught-streaming-ai-generated-albums-impersonating-real-singers?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.
robot (spnet, 1) → All – 17:22:01 2025-08-24
The BBC reports a growing trend in music: "for established (but not superstar) artists to be targeted by fake albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services."
Even dead musicians have had AI-generated "new" material added to their catalogues... According to music industry analysts Luminate, about 99,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services every day, usually via dozens of distribution services, which ask the uploader to submit the artist's details. If that information is incorrect, and a song wrongly gets listed under an existing artist's name, it's down to them or their label to complain and get it removed.
Spotify took three weeks to remove fakes of folk singer/songwriter Emily Portman, according to the article, "and she still hasn't regained control of her Spotify artist profile... Considering how the streaming era has already made a big dent in many artists' incomes, Emily Portman says this affair has felt like a "very low blow"... She suspects independent artists are being targeted because star names have more protection and more power to get fraudulent releases removed swiftly."
But it's also happened to "a number of Americana and folk-rock artists who have had fake tracks posted using their names in recent weeks — apparently all from the same source," including Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, J Tillman (now known as Father John Misty), Sam Beam (aka Iron & Wine), Teddy Thompson and Jakob Dylan:
All the releases used the same style of AI artwork and were credited to three record labels, two with apparently Indonesian names. Many listed the same name as a songwriter — Zyan Maliq Mahardika. That name has also been credited on other songs mimicking real US Christian musicians and metalcore bands. Spotify said it had flagged the issue with the distributor and removed these tracks as they "violated our policy against impersonating another person or brand." It added it would "remove any distributor who repeatedly allows this type of content on our platform"....
Tatiana Cirisano from media and technology analysis company Midia Research says AI is "making it easier for fraudsters" to fool listeners, who are also more "passive" in the algorithmic age. She thinks bad actors posing as real-life artists are hoping their fraudulent tracks will "rack up enough streams" — hundreds of thousands — to earn them a nice payday. "I would think that the AI fakes are targeting lesser-known artists in the hopes that their schemes fly under the radar, compared to if they were to target a superstar who could immediately get Spotify on the line," she notes.
But streaming services and distributors are "working hard" and getting better at spotting it, she stresses, "ironically, also by using AI and machine learning!
[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/08/24/0413234/music-services-caught-streaming-ai-generated-albums-impersonating-real-singers?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.