Spotify’s “fake artist” problem has been in the first place lately. seen in 2017became the topic of conversation once again, with a playlist of 49 almost identical songs from different artists circulating the internet. And no, this isn’t a sharp punch to how all pop music is built. same general concepts; these songs appear to be similar versions of the same poorly produced piece of music, each differentiated by random changes in pitch.
Between its gigantic size and anemic royalty paymentsSpotify has rarely been uncontested. As a true kingmaker operating by the invisible hand of the so-called music market, attempts to mine the service for money are nothing new. Sometimes large companies are suspected including Spotify itself (which strongly refuses). Clever artists too aerobatic movements in the deployed cheek to try and play the system, which is seen as brutally unfair to independent musicians. Recently, it has been determined that the songs of the unnamed artists bear striking similarities with each other. It’s clearly the same piece of music, starts the same way and uses the same melodic motifs, but the album art, artist name, and basic pitch of each version change.
On Twitter, media producer Adam Faze shared a strange discovery by blending 49 seemingly identical songs into a public Spotify playlist titled “these are all the same song.”
It’s a quick listen and yes, there are differences mostly in pitch. But it’s all undeniably the same song.
As many have pointed out in Faze’s responses, they all sound like the product of low-effort productive music techniques or even AI productions – and no, not of the more respectable, exploratory kind. composers, electronic musiciansAnd visual artists they tried for years.
Another oddity of the songs in Faze’s cursed playlist is that each track similar style weird stock image for album art.
It seems this phenomenon is not exclusive to Spotify. Apple Music also appears to have pitched interpretations of classical music attributed to fake artists, as musician Zoë Keating discovered.
kotaku reached out to Spotify and Apple for comment.
While just about anyone can upload music to streaming services with something like a Distrokid account, Universal Media Group recently Searched on Spotify take a stance against artificial intelligence-generated music that removes the likeness of established artists create new music. But as with artificial intelligence-generated visual art, these problems are unlikely to go away.
