Over A Dozen Metalcore & Deathcore Artists Were Hit With Fake Song Uploads On Spotify This Week

Outside of the categorically low payouts to the artists themselves, one of the more annoying wrinkles that streaming music has presented to the end user is incorrectly labeled artists. Sure, back in the days of rampant P2P file sharing you could risk bricking the family computer with the download of what appeared to be a new song from your favorite artist. These days though, it’s a bit more sophisticated.

It’s frustratingly commonplace for a song to worm its way into a weekly new music playlist from an established artist, when it is clearly not from the band in question. Sometimes this occurs due to an artist being bold enough to take on the same name of a more popular band, leading to their catalogs being incorrectly merged on digital service providers.

However, there can also be more nefarious reasons at play, with fake artists attempting to steal the spotlight and potential revenue off the backs of artists they impersonate. It would seem that the metalcore & deathcore scenes were recently the victim of that in a concerted fashion.

Low effort songs were uploaded to the profile pages of numerous bands on Spotify recently, all of which were improperly being labeled as the latest works of the likes of Thy Art Is Murder, Alpha Wolf, Born of Osiris, The Ghost Inside, Bury Tomorrow, Currents, Imminence and more. Each of those songs featured similar, seemingly AI-generated artwork and also AI-generated music as well by the sounds of it.

Given the lackadaisical approach to artwork and the attempt at flooding so many bands at once, whether or not this was a malicious act or an elaborate troll campaign remains to be seen. Either way, it certainly created a bit of confusion amid the respective fan communities of the artists affected by it this week. As of press time, the improperly attributed songs seem to have since been cleaned up from the service.

Caliban were one of the bands affected by the issue and commented on social media:

“Dear Fans,

A song has been released via our Spotify artist profile that is not ours.

A fraudulent artist posing as Caliban has uploaded an Al-generated song via a dubious distributor that is now scheduled for release.

Caliban is not affiliated with this release.

We and our team are working on resolving this issue.

This appears to have occurred with various bands throughout the scene at this time as labels and managements are committed to rectifying the situation.

That being said, we thank you for your ongoing support of real, handcrafted music written by human beings.”