It has been revealed that AI-generated songs have been appearing on the official Spotify pages of artists who died years ago, without the permission of their estates.
Shockingly, an investigation by the 404 website has shown that Blaze Foley, a country singer who passed away in 1989, supposedly released a new song, Together, last week. The song, which features a male country singer, sounds vaguely like a new country song, but it is clearly not Foley – that’s according to Craig McDonald, the owner of Lost Art Records, which distributes Foley’s music and manages his Spotify page.
“I can clearly tell you that this song is not Blaze, not anywhere near Blaze’s style, at all,” he said. “It’s kind of an AI schlock bot, if you will. It has nothing to do with the Blaze you know, that whole posting has the authenticity of an algorithm.”
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McDonald has not yet contacted Spotify directly about the track, though he has contacted Lost Art’s distribution partner, Secretly Distribution. According to a Spotify spokesperson, the track has now been removed from the platform.
“It’s harmful to Blaze’s standing that this happened,” McDonald said. “It’s kind of surprising that Spotify doesn’t have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly.”
“Any real Blaze fan would know, I think, pretty instantly, that this is not Blaze or a Blaze recording,” he said. “Then the harm is that the people who don’t know Blaze go to the site thinking, maybe this is part of Blaze, when clearly it’s not.”
And Foley is not the only artist this is happening to. The 404 reporter discovered a copyright mark at the bottom of the Spotify page for the AI-generated Together from a company called Syntax Error. The same mark can be seen on Happened To You, another AI-generated song by the country singer Guy Clark, who died back in 2016. Happened To You was uploaded to Spotify last week and features another AI-generated image that looks nothing like its supposed author.
There is also a third AI-generated song that has the same Syntax Error copyright mark – With You by Dan Berk.
Though the Foley track has now been taken down, Spotify has yet to outline how it intends to combat what could end up being a serious problem.