(February 24, 2023) So, there you were, checking out new music on your Spotify (or Tidal or Apple Music) account, when all of a sudden you were floored seeing the brand new single from Jill Scott or Phyllis Hyman or Ledisi or Chante Moore or Kenny Lattimore. What's up with that?
Well, you received an even bigger shock when you clicked on the song, and what you heard was a cheaply made, electronic pablum of a song, likely made using AI, with no Jill Scott or Phyllis Hyman in sight. You (along with a lot of other folks), are the victim of the latest "fake song" scam on the streaming services. These consist of nefarious characters trying to trick us all into listening to these songs that we expect are from our favorite singers. And if you listen to one of these songs more than 30 seconds, they get paid the approximately $0.003 that Spotify pays for a spin. And they try to earn as much as they can before the real artists can get the streaming service to pull the song -- which can take weeks or even months.
There have always been fake songs on the streaming services, but it appears to have increased to a new level. This week 20% of my Release Radar playlist is fake. These songs tend to have generic covers of clouds or mountains bearing a simple song title and a famous artist's name. And they're copyrighted by such unknown organizations as Pacifiique Ngirinshuti Music or Ndinaye Eric Music. Are these trick songs working? The fake Jill Scott song had earned around 10,000 listens on Spotify in its first day. That translates into about $3 in streaming fees for that one song on one service for one day. Not a lot, but, with dozens of fake songs on multiple streaming services, you can see how it could add up to thousands of dollars of revenue over a fairly short period.
We've received notes from confused SoulTracks readers, wondering about these, and we're just a frustrated as you are. I get it that the real artists or their fans can contact the streaming services and try to get the songs pulled, but that is laborious and could take weeks (or more) to get resolved (by the way, here are instructions to notify Spotify of an artist identification error). The real key is going to be for the services to do a better job up front in determining the validity of submissions made under artist names. This is the dark side of the automated ease with which anyone can submit music to one of the streaming services. Let your favorite streaming service know; hopefully, this latest fiasco can instigate a better process for adding new music.
By Chris Rizik