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.
“I can clearly tell you that this song is not Blaze, not anywhere near Blaze’s style, at all,” he told me on a call. “It’s kind of an AI schlock bot, if you will. It has nothing to do with the Blaze you know, that whole posting has the authenticity of an algorithm.”
McDonald said that his wife noticed that the song appeared on the Spotify page over the weekend but that they had not contacted Spotify yet. They did contact Lost Art’s distribution partner, Secretly Distribution, and have not heard back. Secretly Distribution did not immediately respond to my request for comment.
"We've flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed for violating our Deceptive Content policy," a Spotify spokesperson told me in an email after this article was first published.
SoundOn is a music distributor which is owned by TikTok that mostly exists to allow people to upload music directly to TikTok and earn royalties. SoundOn also allows artists to distribute their music to other platforms. TikTok did not immediately respond to my request for comment but I'll update this story if I hear back.
McDonald, who decided to originally upload Foley’s music to Spotify in order to share it with more people, told me he never thought that an AI-generated track could appear on Foley’s page without his permission.
“It's harmful to Blaze’s standing that this happened,” he said. “It's kind of surprising that Spotify doesn't have a security fix for this type of action, and I think the responsibility is all on Spotify. They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so. And I think they should take that responsibility and do something quickly.”
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.
“Any real Blaze fan would know, I think, pretty instantly, that this is not Blaze or a Blaze recording,” he said. “Then the harm is that the people who don't know Blaze go to the site thinking, maybe this is part of Blaze, when clearly it's not. So again, I think Spotify could easily change some practices. I'm not an engineer, but I think it's pretty easy to stop this from happening in the future.”
There’s a copyright mark at the bottom of the Spotify page for the AI-generated “Together” from a company called Syntax Error. I couldn’t find any information about a music distribution company by that name, but searching Spotify, I found that the same copyright mark appears on a page for another AI-generated song by Grammy winning country singer-songwriter Guy Clark, “Happened To You,” who died in 2016. That song was uploaded to Spotify last week as well, and also features an AI-generated image of a singer that looks nothing like Clark.
A third song that includes the Syntax Error copyright mark, “with you” by Dan Berk, was uploaded at the same time and also features an AI-generated image of a singer who looks nothing like him. Berk did not immediately respond to a request for comment but according to a spokesperson for Reality Defender, a deepfake detection company, all the tracks “have indicators that show a higher-than-normal probability of AI generation.”
AI-generated music on Spotify is not a secret at this point. Last week, a band with more than a million streams on Spotify, Velvet Sundown, made headlines when it finally admitted it was AI-generated. Last year, Sam wrote about AI-generated Christmas music flooding Spotify. But what’s happening with Clark and Foley is much worse. This is not someone trying to monetize AI slop under a new name, but assigning that slop to the name of dead artists without asking for permission.
Update: This article was updated with comment from Spotify.
