Technical death metal group Rings Of Saturn recently found out one of their officially authorized YouTube channels has been hacked. In a bizarre twist, it is currently being used to promote streams of what looks to be a food truck restaurant and card games. Furthering the confusion, the unwanted additions to the channel appear to feature a mixture of Korean and Swedish languages as well.
While not the official YouTube home of the aforementioned group, the compromised channel is instead authorized ‘topic’ channel overseen by their distributor Tunecore. If you’ve been on YouTube channel for awhile, there’s a good chance you’ve run across the ‘topic’ channel of popular musical artists.
Those channels are usually set up by a digital music distributor with approval from the artist to post their various works on the service, thus providing an official way to stream them.
Rings Of Saturn outlined their case on Twitter amid an appeal to YouTube to get the issue resolved:
@TeamYouTube The "Rings of Saturn Topic" channel in which we distribute our music via Tunecore for YouTube Music has been hacked and is wrongfully being claimed as the Official Artist Channel for our band. My personal channel "Rings of Saturn Band Official" has not been hacked. pic.twitter.com/DeiFz9jmdl
— Rings of Saturn (@RingsofSaturn_) February 23, 2023
@TeamYouTube They are hijacking all of our existing music and playlists and impersonating us while promoting their own videos and live streams, which are irrelevant to our band. Our fans have made us aware of this because they are subscribed to this channel for our music. pic.twitter.com/rM1nrZaVrg
— Rings of Saturn (@RingsofSaturn_) February 23, 2023
@TeamYouTube I have already contacted Tunecore about the issue and submitted the "Report a potential account hijacking to our support team" form through YouTube help. Please help us reclaim this channel so that we can distribute our music to YouTube properly. Thank you!
— Rings of Saturn (@RingsofSaturn_) February 23, 2023
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