Musicians on the mystery of fraudsters releasing songs in their name

Last month, the awarded singer Emily Portman received a message from a fan renting her new album and saying that “English folk music is in good hands”.

It would normally be a compliment, but the artist based in Sheffield was perplexed.

She therefore followed a link that the fan had published and was taken to what seemed to be his latest version. “But I didn’t recognize it because I hadn’t released a new album,” said Portman.

“I clicked on and discovered an online album everywhere – on Spotify and iTunes and all online platforms.

“It’s called Orca, and it was music that was obviously generated by AI, but it had been intelligently formed, I think, on me.”

The 10 tracks had names such as Sprig of Thyme and Silent Hearth – which were “strangely close” to the titles she could choose. This is something that Portman, which won a folk BBC award in 2013, found “really scary”.

When she clicked to listen, the voice – supposedly hers – was a little absent but sang in “a folk style closer to mine than AI could produce,” she said. The instrumentation was also strangely similar.

Although the music generated by AI is online, it is often published under fictitious names, or imitates the big stars, but it normally does not appear on their official streaming pages.

There is now an increasing trend, however, for established artists (but not the superstar) are targeted by false albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services. Even dead musicians had a “new” material generated by AIA added to their catalogs.

Portman does not know who put the album under his name or why. She was falsely credited as interpreter, writer and copyright holder. The producer listed in the credits was Freddie Howells – but she says that this name means nothing for her, and there is no online trace of a producer or a musician of this name.

As for the music itself, although it is sufficient to convince certain fans, the lack of real human creative contribution made it “empty and virgin”, she says.

“I can never sing so perfectly in agreement. And that’s not the point. I don’t want. I am human.”

A few days later, another album appeared on Portman’s streaming pages. This time, less effort had been made to imitate it. It was “20 instrumental radicage tracks,” she said. “Just Ai Sals.”

She filed copyright complaints to have the albums removed and said that the episode has redoubled her “belief in the importance of real creativity and how she moves people”.

“I hope that AI’s music has not done this for people,” she continues. “Although I received an email from someone who said:” Where’s Orca? It was repeated. “Thus, people were deceived by this.”

Whoever published online albums will receive fees, but no song on Orca has had more than 2,000 pieces on Spotify – so income would not have exceeded $ 6 (£ 4.40) per track.

According to analysts from the Luminate music industry 99,000 songs are downloaded from streaming services every dayGenerally via dozens of distribution services, which ask the downloader to submit the artist’s details.

If this information is incorrect and a song is wrongly under the name of an existing artist, it is their label to complain and delete it.

Portman says that certain platforms quickly removed the orca from their platforms, but Spotify took three weeks, and she has still not regained control of her profile as an artist Spotify.

In a press release, Spotify said: “These albums were misused to the wrong profile of an artist different from the same name, and were deleted once reported.”

Portman questions this. Although there is another singer of the same name on Spotify, the albums did not look like him and have not been added from his profile.

She says that the “painful” experience resembles “at the beginning of something enough dystopian” – and also highlights a lack of legal guarantees for artists.

She suspects that independent artists are targeted because stars names have more protection and more power to obtain fraudulent versions deleted quickly.

Like Portman, musician, producer and composer based in New York, Josh Kaufman, who played on the folk album of Taylor Swift, was alerted by false new equipment by his listeners.

“I just started to receive messages from fans and friends on a new music that I have just released, and how a change was a change [stylistically]”He said.

“I think most people were connected to the fact that he was someone else who used my artist profile as a way to publish strange music that was clearly generated by computer.”

In the case of Kaufman, his identity had been used to publish a song entitled Somebody Who’s Love Me, which looked like “a Casio keyboard demo with broken English words”.

“It was embarrassing and just a little confusing,” he adds. “This [music] is the thing we do, right? It is the signature of our soul, and that someone else can enter it and have just access like that … “

He is one of the many American and folk -rock artists who have had false songs published using their names in recent weeks – apparently all of the same source.

Others include Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy, J Tillman (now known as father John Misty), Sam Beam (alias Iron & Wine), Teddy Thompson and Jakob Dylan.

All outings used the same style of works of art from AI and were credited with three record companies, two with apparently Indonesian names. Many have listed the same name as a songwriter – Zyan Maliq Mahardika.

This name was also credited with other songs imitating real Christian musicians and Metalcore groups.

Spotify said that this had pointed out the problem with the distributor and abolished these avenues when they “violated our policy against the identity of another person or a mark”.

He added that he “would delete any distributor who repeatedly allows this type of content on our platform”.

Kaufman made a reading list of all the songs he was able to find and gave him a derogatory name. “It’s more fun to laugh about it than feeling bad about it,” he said. “But it is disconcerting that it can happen.”

And it was strange for him, as a musician and producer who will generally “under the radar”, to be targeted. “Why not go for someone big?” he asks. “If you try to accumulate royalties of a certain kind.”

When royalties could have passed, he had no idea. “I don’t even know what the enemy is, to be honest,” he said. “Is it a computer? Is it a person sitting somewhere by developing this music to play with someone?”

One thing is certain – he wants companies such as Spotify to be more proactive in the prevention of fraudulent music appear on their platforms.

Tatiana Cirisano of the media analysis society and Midia Research technologies says that AI “facilitates fraudsters” to deceive listeners, who are also more “passive” at algorithmic age.

She thinks that bad actors pretending to be real artists hope that their fraudulent tracks “will accumulate enough flows” – hundreds of thousands – to earn them a good salary.

“I think that the counterfeits of the AI ​​target artists less known in the hope that their patterns fly under the radar, compared to if they were to target a superstar which could immediately obtain Spotify on the line,” she notes.

But streaming services and distributors “work hard” and improve to locate it, it emphasizes, “ironically, also using AI and automatic learning!”

“I think it is clear to everyone that each stakeholder must do their part,” she said. “But it’s complicated.”

When a new song appeared last month on the verified artist’s page of the singer Country Blazey, she was a big surprise for Craig McDonald, owner of the Foley label – in particular because Foley died in 1989.

The “Ai Schlock”, as McDonald says, was obviously not in the style “Texas Singer-Long-songwriter”.

“Blaze had a talent for writing songs, but with this talent, total authenticity,” he said. “As they say, three agreements and the truth. And that was clearly not everything.”

McDonald, who directs Lost Art Records, fears that the dupes of AI will interfere with the credibility of artists like Foley, especially for people who do not know their sound.

What would Foley have done with all of this? “Blaze would have liked because the photo that accompanied him really reduced him, he took off about 30 lb and also gave him a modern haircut,” said McDonald.

“But he would also say:” I want 10% of a penny that Spotify collects. Send it to my way “.”

Given how the streaming era has already made a big breach in the income of many artists, Emily Portman says that this affair felt a “very low blow”.

In addition to trying to tackle her faceless IA impostor, she now records her first (real) solo album for 10 years – which, unlike AI, takes time, money and deep personal creativity. She says that it will cost at least £ 10,000 to do, to pay people who play, produce, liberate it and promote it.

But the result, it is enthusiastic, will be something authentic and human.

“I can’t wait to bring real music to the world!”