How an AI-generated song ended up on a dead artist's Spotify page

Emanuel Maiberg from journalist-owned tech news publication 404 Media decided to investigate.

A sub-Reddit called ‘mildly infuriating’ put him on to the story, he told RNZ’s Music 101.

“Someone who is a fan of this musician, Blaze Foley, posted an image of this new song that was posted to his official Spotify page, and he was very angry because he said, A; clearly this is not Blaze Foley's music, this is not what he sounds like, this is not the type of music he makes. And B, this is obviously AI generated.”

The poster’s third point was that Foley had been dead for thirty years, Maiberg says.

Foley was an underground Texan country artist in the Townes Van Zandt mould who achieved little commercial success before he was murdered in 1989, Maiberg says.

“The song on Spotify, which is called ‘Together’, which was AI generated, sounds more like an overly produced modern country song and also has that quality of a lot of AI generated media, which is it’s like a lot of other music that you might hear or what you would expect a machine would produce if you were to ask it to produce a country song.

“It's kind of like this horribly average music that I don't even want to call it elevator music.”

A far cry from Foley’s earthy low-fi style of music, he says.

“It's like this medium that only a computer could come up with.”

The song was accompanied by a generative AI picture of someone who was not Foley, he says.

“Blaze Foley, [is an] older man, rough-looking, big bushy beard and moustache, cowboy hat, you know it seems like he lived like a hard life. He was a tough guy from Texas.”

The image that went up on Spotify couldn’t have been less on the mark, he says.

“More like a modern-day rock and roll punk guy. He's got like a cool leather jacket and a black shirt and tight pants and like this cool kind of short on the side, long pointy hair. Yeah, just like nothing to do with country.”

This all begged the question, how did this happen?

“There is a copyright mark at the bottom of the page for this song, indicating that it belongs to a company called Syntax Error. I could not find any other online traces of this company.

“But by searching Spotify for that company, I found other AI generated songs. And so, this is something that they do.”

Maiberg contacted Spotify for comment.

“After the story is published, they take down the song and they say: ‘We flagged the issue to SoundOn, the distributor of the content in question, and it has been removed for violating our deceptive content policy’.”

SoundOn is an online music distributor, he says, specialising in feeding TikTok with musical content.

“SoundOn allows you to upload your music to Spotify and collect royalties on it when it's played on Spotify.

“But because they are already hosting and holding your songs, they also distribute your music to all the other platforms, Spotify, Apple, Tidal, YouTube.

“So someone probably went to SoundOn, said, I am Blaze Foley. This is my music. Please distribute it to all the other platforms because I want my music on Spotify.”

The AI-generated Foley song was uploaded to SoundOn and then winds up on the official page for Blaze Foley on Spotify, he says, with the royalties from the plays on Spotify trickling back into this “fake company called Syntax Air”.

It’s happened before with more high-profile artists such as Beyonce, he says.

“It's some sort of scheme to mooch off the popularity of other artists in order to collect the fractions of a penny that artists make on streams on Spotify and other platforms.”

He suspects this type of AI skulduggery has shifted to lesser-known artists as it’s less likely to be detected.

“I think, maybe rather than get one song on Beyonce's page, you get one song on hundreds and hundreds of lesser-known artists.

“And in aggregate, that is worth some amount of money because of the few plays that each of them gets.”

The label that actually owns Foley’s music, Lost Art Records, was never contacted by Spotify, he says.

The owner is a music enthusiast called Craig McDonald.

“He said I'm not a software engineer, but I feel like if you're going to put a new track on Blaze Foley's Spotify page, which I nominally own and am in charge of, you have to check in with me first, right?”

This kind of “AI slop” is likely to proliferate in the future, he says.

“I hate to be apocalyptic about it, but that either destroys the internet as we know it and just makes it unusable because we're swimming through all this low-quality, AI-generated content, or we find a way to curate through all that mess and have real people providing real things to other real people.”