A couple of months ago, many music fans were fooled by a band on Spotify called The Velvet Sundown that claimed to be real but instead turned out to be generated by AI, including everything from the music to the photos of the group.
Now, generative-AI tools — or, more accurately, some of the people who use them — are causing headaches for real musicians as AI-generated songs appear on their official profile pages without fans realizing they’re fake.
Take British folk singer-songwriter Emily Portman. She recently received a message from a fan thanking her for her latest work, which came as a surprise as she hasn’t released anything recently, BBC News reported.
The artist took a look for herself and found what looked like a new album — called Orca — on her official pages on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms.
She said the music on the 10 tracks sounded a bit like something she may have created — including a voice that sounded similar to hers — leading Portman to conclude that the AI software had been carefully prompted by someone to emulate her work.
She said that even the song titles were “uncannily close” to ones she might have come up with.
Even more concerningly, she was credited for all of the work on the fake album — including the writer and performer — and was even listed as the copyright holder.
A short while later, Portman said another album appeared on her streaming pages, but the quality of the music on this one was rather on the shoddy side, with the artist describing it to BBC News as “20 tracks of instrumental drivel … just AI slop.”
Portman contacted the streamers about the fake album and the AI-generated tracks have now been taken down, with Spotify taking a lengthy three weeks to remove it.
Spotify’s official statement on the incident is rather curious, saying: “These albums were incorrectly added to the wrong profile of a different artist by the same name, and were removed once flagged.”
That makes it sound like less of an issue, but Portman said that while there is indeed another artist on Spotify with the same name, her music is markedly different from her own, and the music that was removed from her Spotify profile has yet to be added to the other artist’s page.
The BBC’s report offers other examples of AI-generated music that uses an established artist’s identity to drive more traffic, thereby earning the uploader more revenue.
Portman’s experience highlights a troubling and expanding problem in the music industry, and one that is likely to get worse as the generative-AI tools improve. Streaming services like Spotify clearly need to do more to ensure the authenticity of the tracks on their platforms, both to protect artists’ branding and to give fans confidence that what they’re hearing is the real deal.
