jJason Moran, a renowned jazz composer and pianist, received a strange call from a friend last month. The friend, bassist Burniss Earl Travis, was curious about Moran’s new record he saw on the music streaming service Spotify.
“It has your name,” Travis told him. “But I don’t think it’s you.”
Moran said he doesn’t use Spotify or put his music on the platform, preferring only to use the Bandcamp site, so he had no follow-up. After some digging, he found an artist profile bearing his name on Spotify, which was filled with albums from his former label, Blue Note Records, which owns the rights to his old music. There he saw a new EP titled For You. Her album cover was done in a moody Japanese anime style and showed a young woman sitting on the ground in the rain. He gave it a listen.
“There’s not even a pianist on this whole damn record,” Moran said, laughing. He described the music as indie pop and said, “It wasn’t even remotely close to anything I would do.” It was proposed to remove the fake album.
Moran is among a growing number of musicians who have been attacked on music streaming platforms by what appear to be artificial intelligence robots posing as real artists. It’s happened to at least a dozen famous jazz musicians, indie rock artists, and even rapper Drake. For musicians to have to deal with the avalanche of AI waste is frustrating, Moran said. The feeling is also surreal.
“It’s like that episode of Black Mirror with Salma Hayek,” he said, referencing an episode of the near-future dystopian television series where a reality show version of a character negatively affects the life of the original. “She doesn’t even have to be present in this episode, like they’re just using a version of her.”
Spotify has acknowledged the problem and extent of the AI decline on its platform, revealing last September that it had removed more than 75 million “spam tracks” over the previous 12 months. At the time, the company also said it was strengthening protections for musicians, including stricter rules on impersonation.
Last month, the company said in a blog post that he was working on a new tool to “give artists more control over what appears under their name” and that “protecting the artist’s identity” is a top priority. The tool would allow artists to review and then approve or reject releases before they are published on the platform.
“Spotify employs a variety of security measures to protect artists, including systems designed to detect and prevent unauthorized content, human review, and reporting and takedown processes,” a company spokesperson said, adding that Spotify was the only streaming service to offer something like its new tool.
But for Moran, former artistic director of jazz at the Kennedy Center, these solutions are not enough, especially since AI content is not always flagged internally and the problem does not appear to be slowing down. He worries about the extra work for artists like him, who don’t put their music on Spotify, and for musicians who are no longer alive.
“How does John Coltrane or Billie Holiday verify that this new record isn’t a fake, you know, ‘newly found concert in Paris from 1952’?” Moran said. “They have no way to do that… there is no way they can object.”
Spotify’s spokesperson said that holders of assets or rights of a deceased artist can opt into the company’s new tool if they have an account. For those artists who do not have accounts, whether living or deceased, the spokesperson said, Spotify will continue to rely on its internal detection and accountability systems.
‘AI has become an accelerator’
After Travis tipped Moran off about the fake For You album, Moran posted a video about the debacle on his Instagram and Facebook accounts. He said a litany of artists approached him and told him that they, too, had been victims of what appeared to be an AI disaster. Some of them said they had been dealing with this for years.
In the jazz genre alone, Moran said, AI impersonation has affected pianist Benny Green, saxophonist Antonio Hart, drummer Nate Smith, Australian band Hiatus Kaiyote and singers Dee Dee Bridgewater, Jazzmeia Horn and Freddy Cole, Nat King Cole’s brother.
“So this thing now moves around copying the names of a lot of important artists,” Moran said. “Imagine if someone released a new record under the name Frank Ocean. Believe me, people will listen to it, even if it’s not Frank Ocean.”
Last October, NPR reported that indie rock musicians Luke Temple and Uncle Tupelo had had their accounts hijacked by AI, as had the now-deceased electro-pop artist Sophie and country music singer Blaze Foley. In a bizarre situation in December, Australian psych-rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard removed their music from Spotify, only to see an AI impersonator called King Lizard Wizard fill the void with identical song titles and poorly imitated AI artwork.
Morgan Hayduk, co-CEO of Beatdapp, which offers fraud detection specifically for music streaming, said the problem is not limited to Spotify; It also happens on Apple Music, YouTube, and several other streaming platforms. His company estimates that between 5% and 10% of all industry flows are fraudulent, which breaks down to a value of between $1 billion and $2 billion a year.
That’s money that doesn’t flow to legitimate artists, Hayduk said: “It’s material for the industry, and it’s material for every artist and every person who supports artists who make a living from their music.”
Last month, a man named Michael Smith pleaded guilty to defrauding music streaming platforms by flooding the services with thousands of AI-generated songs and then using automated bots to artificially increase the number of listeners to billions. According to federal prosecutors, Smith made more than $10 million in royalty payments from the platforms over the course of his seven-year plan.
Hayduk said fraudulent music streams have long been a scourge of the industry, but generative AI has supercharged it. When music is played on streaming services, the creator earns a few cents. But those pennies can multiply quickly with enough clicks on enough songs. Hayduk said AI helps bad actors, like Smith, create a hose of content very quickly, and any songs that are removed can be easily replaced.
“AI has become an accelerator,” he said.
Artists Responsibility
Once Moran found the AI intruder in his account, he contacted Spotify for help. That meant having an initial exchange with a chatbot, which eventually led to a conversation with a human. That person was able to verify that Moran was the actual artist and make a claim on his behalf.
Seventy-two hours later, Moran received a message from Spotify: “Good news! We’ve now removed ‘For You’ from your artist profile.”
Moran was relieved that the process was relatively painless, but it took time.
“They let it sit there unless the artist finds it and looks at it,” Moran said. “The demand that is imposed on us is unfair in many ways.”
Sometimes the AI’s fake songs sound vaguely similar to the musician’s; sometimes they don’t. In other cases, albums from multiple artists appear on a musician’s page, which also happened to Moran and which Spotify says may occur due to a metadata mix-up. Just days after Spotify removed For You, another album he hadn’t made was available to stream on his profile. This one was by the authentic Belgian avant-garde band Schntzl. That record has since disappeared from Moran’s profile.
However, three weeks ago, For You resurfaced, this time on YouTube, presenting itself as a Moran album with the same moody anime artwork, indie pop sound, and track listing that appeared on Spotify. It has had few views, approximately 20, but unlike what happened with Spotify, it does not appear on Moran’s artist profile on YouTube.
YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.
Adam Berkowitz, a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama who studies artificial intelligence and copyright law in the music industry, said it can be difficult for streaming services to automatically remove albums from their platforms over potential copyright or phishing issues.
“It gets a little complicated because all of a sudden the private sector is enforcing the law. And that’s just not how it’s supposed to be,” Berkowitz said. “It is the courts that enforce the law.” While most artists, including Moran, have no intention of suing, it is clear that the courts would have a hard time keeping up with these issues. Ultimately, Berkowitz said, it will likely remain up to artists to police their profiles.
The only platform Moran uploads his music to is Bandcamp. That service, he said, allows him to strictly control what’s on his profile and the prices, giving him more agency as an independent artist. In the world of improvisational jazz, Moran said, the idea of making music is not necessarily about cashing checks for record sales, but about creating art and offering it to people.
“One thing that [people] “What they can never charge me for is the power of the songs,” he said.
