Fake albums are flourishing on real artists’ pages, Spotify is struggling to react

An incredible situation where artists can’t even tag this type of fraudulent content that can mislead the public, but is often detected by true fans.

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With the advent of AI, anyone can create art, write, or even make music. If the quality is not always there, most users use these tools in good faith, there are unfortunately always people who misuse the technologies for their own profit.

The latest case concerns Spotifythe famous music streaming platform. During the month of October, and even at the end of September 2024, several fake labels came to upload hundreds of equally fake albums to the platform.

Some of these albums also landed on the real accounts of real artists with millions of fans, and were thus detected. Music not in keeping with what the group does, cover art not matching graphically and, for real fans, album released at a time when no new album has been released!

Fake music albums on Spotify

If certain albums were spotted by fans, it was mainly Glenn McDonald, a former tech at Spotify who discovered the large-scale deception. He also tried to notify Spotify via X, but to no avail, the albums are still there for the moment.

Hey @Spotifyyou got thousands of junk albums with real artist names from “Ancient Lake Records”, “Beat Street Music” and “Gupta Music” today.

— glenn mcdonald (@glenn_mcdonald) October 11, 2024

The labels he names, as well as another discovered subsequently, are at the origin of several hundred albums (240 for Beat Street Music, 471 for Ancient Lake Record, 483 for Gupta Music and 600 for Future Jazz Records), all in the space of a few days.

An astronomical number which means that there was a chance that real groups would be impacted, this is notably the case of Gong (experimental music), Yes (English rock), Asia (English rock), Swans (experimental rock), and others.

But how did fake albums end up on the pages of real artists? In fact, when a label uploads albums, they can either link them to the artist’s ID or just enter their name. It is very likely that the fake labels used random artist names and thus the albums ended up in the wrong place.

It is also unlikely that these albums were added to harm the groups concerned. In fact, it is more likely that the aim of the fake labels (certainly belonging to the same person) is solely to collect royalties.

In an interview given to the media Ars TechnicaGlenn McDonald regrets that Spotify did not take control of this problem, he indicates that in his time the albums would have been immediately removed from the artists’ pages. Furthermore, for him, the false labels should have been detected immediately, which would have been the case at the time he was in office, in particular, because he had developed a computer tool for monitoring the database.