It seems that Spotify is publishing new songs generated by artificial intelligence on the official pages of long-dead artists without permission.
How reports 404 media, the official Spotify page of country singer Blaze Foley, who was murdered in 1989, recently posted a new song, Together, illustrated by an image of a man apparently generated by artificial intelligence who does not look like Foley.
Craig MacDonald, owner of Lost Art Records, which owns the rights to distribute all of Foley’s music and manages his Spotify page, says that any Foley fan will immediately realize that Together — is not his song.
«I can clearly say that this song is not in Blaze’s style, not in Blaze’s style at all. It’s kind of like artificial intelligence, if you will. It has nothing to do with Blaze».
MacDonald’s wife noticed that the song appeared on Spotify last weekend. The owners contacted Lost Art’s distribution partner, Secretly Distribution.
«We have reported the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed due to a violation of our misleading content policy,» a Spotify spokesperson told the site.
Distributor SoundOn is owned by TikTok and exists primarily to allow people to upload music directly to TikTok and receive royalties. SoundOn also allows artists to distribute your music on other platforms. McDonald, who once decided to upload Foley’s music to Spotify to share it with more people, told me that he never thought that an AI-generated track could appear on Foley’s page without his permission.
«This is damaging Blaze’s reputation. It’s strange that Spotify doesn’t have a security patch for such actions, and I think the entire responsibility lies with Spotify. They could have solved this problem. One of their talented software developers could have stopped this fraudulent practice if they had the will to do so. I think they should take this responsibility and do something quickly».
It is possible to ban any track on an artist’s official Spotify page without prior permission from the page owner. At the bottom of the Spotify page, there is a copyright mark for the song Together, generated by artificial intelligence, for a company called Syntax Error. There is no information about the distributor of music with this name, but 404 media found some other generated songs with this mark.
Music, created by artificial intelligenceprobably has a right to exist. However, the core of the problem is not in the method of track creation, but in the infringement of intellectual property rights. It’s also unclear how tracks can appear on artists’ pages without the owners’ knowledge The author of this news story on ITC.ua became interested in it because he also noticed strange songs on the pages of deceased artists on Spotify. But at the time, he did not investigate it more thoroughly, and now the songs seem to be gone.
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