Hi, and hello, everyone. Whythony Whytano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. Hope you're doing well, because today, we're talking about another annoying issue in the music industry that will not end despite the fact that it could so easily be fixed, and it should very much be fixed, enter in a bassist, producer, composer, songwriter, extraordinaire, Mr. Paul Bender of Hiatus Coyote fame, who recently uploaded a video to social media that was brought to my attention, where he's putting out a call for a persistent problem we have been seeing over and over and over in the age of streaming for years now.

That is artists seemingly having very little control over what music is uploaded to their profiles on various DSPs. And look, this is happening to some degree on all major music streaming platforms, but for whatever reason, it's most persistent instantly an issue on the one that starts with an S and ends with Spotify.

In this video, Paul uploaded to Instagram. He talks about a side project he is also in named The Sweet Enoughs. They dropped this Marshmallow album back in 2020. And despite having no big recent release plans around the corner, Paul actually found there was some new music uploaded to The Sweetenuffs' music profile on Spotify. But it was, again, not anything that they made, sounded nothing like anything they would make. In fact, what Paul shows in his video clip sounds pretty awful.

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"I had to listen to it, and oh my fucking God." - Paul Bender

Having that thing attributed to your name alone, I'm sure, is insult enough. But what this is is actually even worse because we're talking about a musician's profile on the biggest music stream platform on the planet, essentially being hijacked.

Now, if you're new to this problem, or if you just started recently watching this channel, you might react to this story and say, 'What's the big deal? It's just one guy. Not such a big issue in the grand scheme of things. Did it not get taken care of?' Well, yeah, I guess to some degree it did, according to Paul, but it took six weeks.

"And it eventually came off our profile and just went on to its own profile of the same name. And that took six fucking weeks." - Paul Bender

On top of it, this issue is actually nothing new, and it's been happening to artists with a pretty wide range of monthly listeners. And despite widespread reporting on this phenomenon, believe it or not, it seemingly hasn't really gotten any better. And it's crazy just how nonstop of an issue this is.

Whether it is distributed distributors or whether it's the music stream platforms themselves, everybody's just like, shrugging their shoulders and passing the buck and acting like they have no responsibility in any of this or just like not taking part in doing anything to fix the problem outside of when a musician or an artist complains enough having the song removed or changed to a different profile, which is obviously such a terrible and frankly toxic way to go about solving the problem.

If anything, it's like a band-aid over a giant gaping wound because this doesn't stop these hackers from doing what they're doing. And I begrudgingly even call them hackers. Going about doing this seems pretty easy. Here's an explanation about how absurdly easy this is to do from YouTuber Tank the Tech:

"In under 10 minutes, I was able to sign up for a distributor service, upload an AI-generated song that one of our Discord members had made, and just pick anybody's profile. And I just chose their profile from a drop-down list. It was that easy. You just have to type in their name, and it came up on the actual portal on the distributor's website. Clicked it, uploaded it, and then just got a message immediately that said, 'Hey, your song is uploaded. It'll be published in the next 5-7 days.'" - Tank The Tech

Doesn't seem like you need to be super tech savvy in order to pull this off. But yes, at one point, it seemed like a lot of these efforts in terms of hijacking musicians pages may have been focused on a lot of bigger artists, people uploading random, maybe even AI tracks on relevant pages in order to hopefully gain some streams through the misconception that, 'Oh, this is a new song for my favorite artist. Let me go stream it.' You go stream it, it's trash. But I'm sure at the end of the day, that still counts as a stream for some of these artists hijacking these pages on these platforms.

However, artists of a certain size and visibility and their labels, their representation, their PR, they're not just going to let something such as that slide. Obviously, they're going to work tirelessly to have that thing taken down. So now it seems like these purveyors of AI slop are trying to just stream, troll across music platforms like Spotify. Their answer now to making money off of the game that they're playing is to essentially flood the zone on as many random and smaller pages as possible in hopes that, I don't know, the artist doesn't notice or maybe they have less power or sway or influence in the industry to actually have anything done about it.

And even if something is done about it, they are smaller artists. So most likely the music stream platforms and distributors are going to be slower to change it or fix it. Meanwhile, that's just probably a ton of streams collectively all being brought together on these fake AI tracks. And then on top of that, it was just disheartening to hear that the change or the fix that Paul was told in this situation was, 'We're just going to take this song and move it over to another profile that pretty much has the same name.'

"We got a response from Spotify after some social media posts on WNDYCRE Island's account and Bender saying, They were so sorry that we were distressed, and that perhaps it's a mapping issue that happens when artists have similar names or the same names, not really acknowledging that clearly these are generative AI songs. The songs still exist under new Sweetenup's profiles. So there's that. We, I guess, need to now send trademark violation notices out to them and work with lawyers and pay lawyers to do that work for us. Meanwhile, on other streaming accounts, the songs are still attached. So now we're going to focus on that." - Si Jay Gould (Wondercore Island Records)

I'm sorry, why isn't that person getting punished? Why is that profile and that song not just getting obliterated entirely? The track wasn't just uploaded to your profile accidentally. This was clearly intentional. Again, this has been an issue on platforms like Spotify for years now. You can't tell me this is a bug. This is obviously a feature. This is all being done on purpose for a reason. Well, that reason is clearly money. But why aren't the people who are hijacking these profiles being disincentivized from doing it in any way? If anything, it seems like artists are the ones who are disincentivized from actually engaging in the arduous process of keeping their profiles free and clean of any AI music or people hijacking their shit.

And it's been happening for so long now. It's just crazy that there's no major player in the industry that has the silver bullet solution and answer to this issue. I mean, at one point in his video, Paul does suggest something along the lines of two-factor authentication, which I don't know if that's the ultimate fix for all of this, but it sounds better than what's going on now.

"I mean, I can't just go onto Mr. Beast's YouTube page and just upload something as him called Mr Beast Poisons the Well of Thousands of Villages and Makes a Million People Blind." - Paul Bender

But yes, again, ongoing issue and a sign of so much rot and inequity in the music industry right now, honestly, because if musicians collectively were actually in a position of power to where they could strongarm Spotify or the music distributors into fixing this issue, then they would just do it without being asked, out of fear that musicians would retaliate in some way. But the labels and the distros and stream platforms have become such a disgusting syndicate, really the gatekeepers of the digital age. And they know they have musicians by the balls to the point where they can say, 'Fuck you. It doesn't matter if our platform is ineffective and filled with AI crap. It's the only place you can go to upload your shit, and you're going to use it anyway. And we're not going to fix any of these problems. Maybe we'll make a few changes if you whine.'

At the end of the day, more uploads, more traffic, even if it's bot traffic, is revenue in their pocket. But yes, Spotify and the distros continue to be a major disappointment every day. Let me know your thoughts on all of this continued madness in the comments.I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano. Fake AI slop crap for never.