Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission

Source: 404 Media

Spotify is publishing new, AI-generated songs on the official pages of artists who died years ago without the permission of their estates or record labels.

According to his official Spotify page, Blaze Foley, a country music singer-songwriter who was murdered in 1989, released a new song called “Together” last week. The song, which features a male country singer, piano, and an electric guitar, vaguely sounds like a new, slow country song. The Spotify page for the song also features an image of an AI-generated image of a man who looks nothing like Foley singing into a microphone.

Craig McDonald, the owner of Lost Art Records, the label that distributes all of Foley’s music and manages his Spotify page, told me that any Foley fan would instantly realize “Together” is not one of his songs.

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McDonald’s suggested fix is not allowing any track to appear on an artist’s official Spotify page without allowing the page owner to sign off on it first.

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Read more: https://www.404media.co/spotify-publishes-ai-generated-songs-from-dead-artists-without-permission/

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The 404 Media reporter found other uploads on Spotify from "Syntax Error" - the cutesy and almost certainly fake name Spotify identifies as the copyright owner. "Syntax Error" had also uploaded AI slop under the name of the late Grammy-winning country singer-singwriter Guy Clark, and more AI slop using the name of singer-songwriter Dan Berk - https://m.youtube.com/@DanBerk/featured - who is NOT deceased.

All of which makes me wonder just how much AI slop is on Spotify under the names of real artists.

I've posted on DU before about Amazon having been entirely too tolerant of AI slop on Kindle. It's more and more obvious that the same is true of Spotify.

The AI-generated track supposedly by Blaze Foley got on Spotify via SoundOn, a music distributor owned by TikTok. SoundOn exists to let TikTok users upload music they've created, and also distribute it to other platforms.

NONE of these companies are being responsible about generative AI.