Fake bands and artificial songs are taking over YouTube and Spotify

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-06-15/fake-bands-and-artificial-songs-are-taking-over-youtube-and-spotify.html

60•geox•7mo ago

Comments

HocusLocus•7mo ago

Everyone gets the Internet they deserve.

derbOac•7mo ago

I wonder if liking one of them opens the floodgates to recommendations for others, and becomes a kind of positive feedback loop.

blacksmith_tb•7mo ago

If it did, it would suggest they actually have metadata indicating it's AI-generated (in spite of whatever protests to the contrary they're making).

add-sub-mul-div•7mo ago

It's not hard for us to pick out slop art and writing that's similar to some samples we've seen. We don't need explicit labeling, models shouldn't either.

nitwit005•7mo ago

Since some people actively try to block AI channels, it's probably quite easy to identify them from user behavior.

derbOac•7mo ago

Maybe, unless people are liking something that AI is providing, without necessarily being aware of it.

izacus•7mo ago

On Spotify I noticed that just not skipping them is enough. I listen to music during work and I noticed it's getting more aggressive at playing tracks from "artists" that don't really exist. I guess it's less royalties for them.

viraptor•7mo ago

Not hugely. There's one ai album I genuinely enjoyed and liked it on YouTube. I get an occasional generated album recommendation now, but it's nowhere near floodgates.

lucas_membrane•7mo ago

This may be good news. Some people will want to consume more real natural music. The best way to make this happen with minimal incidence of fakery will be very small-scale cottage-industry performance venues, 10 to 50 people in a room, including both musicians and performers, voices, instruments and no wires, wireless, computers or electronics involved. Do the math, and you can see that a few musicians should be able to make a pretty good living performing that way with ticket prices no higher than what millions are now paying to sit in crowds of 10,000 or so. Of course, there will be an adjustment period as the mass-production of culture and art declines, and small-scale decentralized production becomes the norm. The media moguls will try to convince us that art made by machine is superior, and their opinion shaping conglomerates will keep manufacturing superstar icons to deliver it. But cottage-industry music will be almost as hard to control as cottage-industry terrorism, and underground cooperatives of radical musicians and listeners will pop up and start making and sharing music with each other for free. As anything free is not counted in the Gross National Product, this will be terrible for the economy, and it will also distract people from all the other distractions to which we are supposed to addict ourselves. Use your brains; lose your chains!

norir•7mo ago

It's interesting that you say this because I have been doing exactly this over the last few years using only the voice and body percussion. There are small groups all over the us (and world) doing vocal improvisation for free or at very low cost. It is the most quietly radical thing that I do as well as the most life affirming. I am convinced that if a critical mass of people begin to sing together, it has the power to radically change our world for the better.

Singing is our birthright. Unfortunately, I think that the music industry, for all the wonderful gems it has produced, has actually made the world a more musically impoverished place in many respects because of the way it has wrongly divided us into a small minority of musicians and a huge majority of passive listeners.

AlotOfReading•7mo ago

This already exists at thousands of local music venues around the world. It doesn't pay enough to live reasonably on, which is obvious if you just look at the numbers. Even with a megastar ticket price of $300*(50 attendees), a single show barely moves the needle on living expenses once split amongst a band. You need to do perform again and again, to the point where you can't charge $300/ticket. That's basically a residency, which is common in places like Vegas for artists at the end of their career. If you tour instead, your costs go up massively.

cityzen•7mo ago

Pop Will Eat Itself was right all along…

awakeasleep•7mo ago

I wonder how it is affecting music torrent sites- they reward people uploading new music with download quota, so it seems like a way for torrenters to cheat the system.

prawn•7mo ago

Fake movie trailers on YouTube as well.

viraptor•7mo ago

And Spotify is not interested in improving at all. One artist I liked got some generated things added as new albums years ago and I still can't find a way to tell them they're different artists using the same name. The band is not active it seems and not interested in raising the issue themselves. Spotify ignored all the feedback I tried to send. They really don't give a fuck as long as money keeps coming.

taskforcegemini•7mo ago

question is who rakes in the money then

antfarm•7mo ago

Spotify has been accused of recommending their own AI-generated fake artists in order to avoid paying royalties to real artists.

lofaszvanitt•7mo ago

Yeh but where are the hits coming from?

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