Spotify Is Publishing AI Tracks of Dead Artists

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support to subscribe go to 404media.co as well as bonus content every single week subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments gain access to that content at 404media.co i am your host joseph and with me are the 404 media co-founders sam cole hey emmanuel mayberg hello and jason kebler hello hello uh all right straight off the top i would just remind people that we're having an event in los angeles july 30th wednesday at 6 p.m 404 media subscribers get in for free there's going to be free wine and beer we're going to do a live podcast recording it's most likely going to be about the technology that powers uh immigration and customs enforcement Obviously, that has a ton of relevance to Los Angeles recently.

1:10I believe you might have some guests, but we're finalizing that. There's a link in the show notes. Sign up if you're a subscriber in Los Angeles and come along for some free booze and to hang out with us and meet like-minded people. If you're not a subscriber, it's$10 to get in. But to be honest, that's also the cost of a subscription. So just subscribe. I don't know. That would make more sense. Yeah, if you don't look at the show notes, you can find the event page by going to bit.ly. So bit.ly slash 404rip space, RIP space. That's the name of the venue that we're having it at. So it's bit.ly slash 404rip space.

1:54And if you're not in Los Angeles, we are going to probably attempt to do some live streaming beforehand. No promises. is we're going to try to set it up though just to to experiment with something new uh could be fun so i guess like uh if you're online wednesday afternoon check our socials etc we may be going live hopefully yeah still not sure how we're going to do that but i think it'll be a fun experiment and just doing these events you know gives us a chance to try something new the other piece of housekeeping before we get to this week's stories is that we just published a wave of our ice coverage uh in spanish we got a professional team of translators to translate into spanish uh that for us it's something like eight articles if you are a subscriber and you follow via an rss feed you probably just got a bunch of spanish articles into your feed and i got some comments of people asking oh what's going on and then it became clear what was happening, which is that we think this coverage is really important and more people should be able to read it.

3:00So, you know, we've taken money kindly given to us by our subscribers and paid for this to be translated. So if you see that on the site, that's why. And if you think of anybody who really could do with reading that coverage, of course, please send it to them as well. All right, let's get into this week's stories. The first is one from a manual. The headline is Spotify publishes AI generated songs from dead artists without permission. I mean, kind of spoils it in the head. There isn't really a twist here. It's very, very on the nose and very clear what this is going to be about. But this sort of starts at the beginning, Emmanuel.

3:39Who is Blaze Foley? I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Who is that exactly? Yeah, so I'll just, I'll give the caveat that I'm not a big music expert and definitely not a country music expert, but I was very interested in Blaze Foley's story, who I frankly only learned about from reporting the story. But he was a country singer, songwriter, poet from Texas, was performing mostly in Texas, I believe mainly active in the 80s. He was tragically killed in 1989. And as far as I understand, died mostly on unknown. People knew him in the Texan music scene, but he wasn't a very famous country singer.

4:33And after his death, somebody who owns a label in Texas discovered a live recording of what I think was his last live show a few days before he was murdered and he just loved it when looking for more recording uh of his music got in touch with his mother and asked for permission to uh put all his music out uh and he did this is uh craig mcdonald who i talked to for this story he runs lost art records and they are like the company that puts all the music and since he did that he he got uh posthumously like more famous and kind of is like a loved country country singer whose music is on on spotify thanks to mcdonald yeah and uh with all that context a little bit weirdly he allegedly has a new song called together i'm gonna play just a few snippets of it i'll probably jump through but here's a little bit of that it's just that the night has fallen and i want to be with you

5:52okay so what's the issue with this song i think there are two issues the first one's pretty obvious that he's not alive what's the second issue so yeah i mean according to the spotify page for this song which appeared on blaze foley's official spotify page like if you search spotify for blaze foley and you went to his official artist page you would see this as his latest song it claimed to have been released on July 14 which doesn't make sense because he's dead and then also if you were a Blaze Foley fan you would immediately know that this is not his music I think Jason and Sam listen to some country music and from what I understand this is kind of like maybe like modern country music adjacent maybe but this is not the kind of music that Blaze Foley put out and I don't know if we can or want I have to admit I don't know much about Blaze Foley either I do listen to country sometimes but this doesn't really sound like him yeah it's like super produced and like I don't know what the correct term for it but like pop country or something like that and he was like way more gritty kind of like a load on an acoustic guitar kind of vibe i i will say real quick the fact that he's dead doesn't necessarily mean like no new music comes out just because it's like there's been so many artists uh like elliot smith died and then released like four more albums because it's like state went through his demos and started releasing them like tupac what the joke was like tupac have you heard tupac's new album like 15 years after he died same with like juice world etc up but like to be clear these are not this is not that this is like nothing like that well emmanuel maybe it's helpful to go back um a little bit and just tell us how did you learn about this and we'll get to the fact there's ai generated in a minute and maybe that was in the original tip as well i will say that us just listen to it now i mean i haven't listened to a ton of ai generated music.

8:14We have spoken about it on the podcast before. We have played snippets on the pod before as well. And that was very, very obvious then. This was like more than a year ago. And it has that like wishy-washy, almost dreamlike quality. I don't know. I listened to that. Sounds like that could be a recording, but that's getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. How did you learn about this, first of all? I first learned about it from a Reddit post that I believe was posted to R Artificial, which is an AI subreddit, but it was from someone who was a fan of Dave Foley, and they just shared a screenshot of that Spotify page.

8:50Which, by the way, doesn't only include this AI-generated song, it includes an AI-generated image of the artist, who is a young, I don't know, punk singer of some kind. Again, not Blaze Foley, who has a cowboy hat and a big beard and mustache. looks like a Texan country singer. And they were like, this sucks. This sucks. I'm a fan of him. And this is super disrespectful. And we know that there's AI music on Spotify. This is not something that Spotify has banned. I don't know. Someone could argue that having a lot of AI-generated tracks on Spotify benefits them. but the fact that it was flagged by a fan first and the fan said like this is super disrespectful to a dead artist is obviously what caught my attention uh and why i decided to look into it immediately verified that um this happened verified that it has happened to other people and I was like, who do I talk to in order to verify this?

10:05You can't talk to the artist, he has died. So I looked at who manages his music and reached out to this record company and then ended up talking to Craig McDonald, who was quite nice and also understandably offended. He does this as a business, but clearly it is a passion project that he got into out of respect and love for this guy's music. I was horrified that this happened. Yeah, I was going to ask, just to elaborate on that, you say he was horrified. What was his reaction to this happening? And did he already know? Or were you the one who told him? He knew. He said that his wife noticed it the day before.

10:47It was over the weekend, so they had not contacted Spotify yet. He did contact a distribution partner, who he believes manages some of the Spotify end of things, and he had not heard back from them. I reached out to them as well, and I have not heard back from them either. His reaction, I think he had two main points. The first is, he put the music on Spotify, not because it was some genius money-making scheme, because artists don't make a lot of money on Spotify. It's just like, even if millions of people listen to Blaze Foley on Spotify, that would not really benefit him a lot financially. He put it on there because he was like, oh, more people could discover this guy's music who I love and I want to share with the world and it's like a really easy way to access it.

11:36So I'll put it there. I think totally fair. And he was in a situation where this page that he was allegedly in charge of without his permission suddenly put this fake bullshit bad music in front of people and said, hey, this is actually Blaze Foley. And that he found damaging because it misrepresented the artist, it disrespected his music, etc. So that's the first point, which I think is totally fair. The other one, he was like, I'm not an engineer. I'm not a computer guy. I'm not an expert. But he was like, I feel like this should be easy to fix. I feel like this should be easy to fix and prevent entirely with the simple addition of like, hey, if I manage this page, could Spotify please check in with me before they add anything else to the page?

12:25And I thought, yeah, that sounds like a totally fair way to handle this. So that's kind of his response. Yeah, and you mentioned this, but there's something I just want to stress, which is that this is not just like the earlier examples of AI music. There was a Drake track a couple of years ago, right? Or people didn't know whether it was Drake or not, and impersonating of AI, blah, blah, blah. I don't have to go into all of that, but that happened. This is that, but also Spotify is representing it from the official account, from the official page of this artist. And I think that's what really stings a lot here.

13:10Before we just get to a couple more questions, what are some other examples then? So it's not just one artist. You found, I think, a couple more as well, right? Yeah, so there is another singer-songwriter, also a country singer-songwriter named Guy Clark. He actually won a Grammy. And he's much more famous than Blaze. And he had a song called Happen to You, which was also AI generated. It seems to have come from the same place as the fake Blaze song. And that seems pretty clear to me based on, again, it had the same kind of AI-generated image of a guy who looked nothing like Guy Clark. And there was a copyright at the bottom of both pages, both indicating that the copyright belonged to a company called Syntax Error, which I couldn't find any traces of online other than a few Spotify pages that were AI-generated songs on the pages of real human artists on Spotify.

14:20So there's Guy Clark, and then another one, a singer named Dan Burke, who I think is relatively unknown and is very much alive, had one of these songs on his page. I reached out to him. I haven't heard back. If anybody knows Dan Burke, please hit him up and tell him to get back to me. I'd love to hear his perspective. And yeah, I ran all of these by a company called Reality Defender, who we mentioned a few times, and they do deepfake detection. And they said all the songs seem to be AI-generated. Gotcha. So do we know exactly what is going on here? how are these AI-generated songs, which are made by the original artist, how are they ending up on the official profiles of real artists?

15:09Is it something to do with how people upload tracks at Spotify or something, or mischaracterize it? Do we have any insight into that yet, or does that come later, do you think? So I published a story, and then immediately after I published, Spotify came back to me and said that they removed all the songs that I mentioned here and that I flagged to them. All these songs that were uploaded seemingly by this entity called Syntax Error. And what Spotify claims is, I'll just read what they said. We flagged the issue to sound on the distributor of the content in question and it has been removed for violating our deceptive content policy.

15:56That's the extent of their statement. And I was like, okay, interesting. What is SoundOn? This is the first time that SoundOn has been mentioned by anyone that I talked to and entered the conversation. SoundOn is a company owned by TikTok and is essentially a music distribution company that TikTok runs. It exists primarily so if you're an artist and you want to put your music up on TikTok and monetize it, you can do it via SoundOn. So you upload it to SoundOn, they make it easy to put it on TikTok and then earn your royalties that way. They also handle distribution to other platforms. So if you use SoundOn, you don't have to just put it on TikTok.

16:42You can also take it to Apple Music, to YouTube, to Spotify, maybe Tidal as well. And so I don't know. We don't know for a fact what has happened, but it seems like somebody basically created a fraudulent... This is my theory. Somebody created a fraudulent sound on profile and then used it to upload music to the official pages of all these other artists on all these other platforms. And for whatever reason, nobody bothered to check or the verification system wasn't good enough to detect that this has nothing to do with Blaze Foley or his estate or with Dan Burke or all these other people. And I want to know more about this.

17:27So if you're listening and you're a musician and you have stuff up on other platforms and this is happening to you, I've already heard from quite a few people that this has happened to them. And it definitely seems like something is messed up in the distribution of online music, which includes all these middlemen between the artists, the record company, and the platforms where some fuckery seems to be happening and is what happened here. And also, sorry, another thing I heard since... A lot of people flagged other AI-generated music to me that was attached to the pages of real artists. And it seems like a bunch of them got nuked.

18:06And I might do a story on that later and see how much of this music was actually removed. But my bet is also that SoundOn just killed this one bad player and that took down all this bad music at the same time. Yeah, that makes sense. and I think just to end Jason you wanted to give us an update on AI music I just wanted to say that this seems like it was I guess let's say a bad actor trying to populate this person's official Spotify profile and we have heard this sort of music showing up on other platforms as well but there's been recent articles about AI generated music and artists who don't exist that have gone viral on Spotify and are racking up millions of streams.

18:56And one, it's like, I don't know, that's the future that we're in now. There's AI slop all over Spotify. And then there's also, I don't know how to say it, but slightly better AI music that's more produced that's showing up on Spotify. And a few months ago, we were talking about these lawsuits by Universal Music, Sony, a few other major record labels against Suno, which is an AI music generation platform. And at the time, it seemed like this was going to be perhaps a pretty interesting lawsuit. It was probably going to lead to some sort of consequences for Suno and UDL, which is the other major AI music generation platform.

19:44But in recent weeks, there's been reporting saying that Universal and some other really big record labels are most likely going to settle this case. And they're most likely going to sign some sort of licensing deal, which I guess maybe we should have known was the most likely ultimate outcome of this. But it seems more likely that record labels are going to try to integrate AI music generation into their own ecosystem. And I personally think the end result of that is going to be just way more AI-generated music on every platform all over the place. I don't see it ending super well. And so that's just to say, this phenomenon that Emmanuel has found is super disturbing because it's taking advantage of real-life artists and hijacking their pages and watering down what they're doing.

20:39But I do think that... these platforms are getting increasingly overrun with AI generated music. And I think very soon record labels are like see the ability to generate music without artists and to do it super cheaply and take like a lot of shots at publishing music and trying to have a hit without having to pay human beings. And I just like really worry about where that's going. So I'm sure that we'll continue to cover it. But this big time lawsuit really seems like it's probably not going to move forward. And there's going to probably be some big alliance between the AI music makers and the record labels.

21:21Yeah. And not just not pay people, but also gather the skills themselves to become a musician and develop music. Very, very quick shout out. If you're interested in somebody who is producing generative music, which can do sort of the promise of AI, but it does it in a much more ethical and interesting way, people should check out somebody called Tim Exile, who I've followed for years, and he's been releasing some really, really interesting technology, software, and hardware over the past couple of months. And I'm hoping to cover him at some point as well. All right, we'll leave that there. When we come back, we're going to talk about a story I wrote about, you know, another interesting way, to put it lightly, that hack data is being used or sold to debt collectors.

22:07We'll be right back after this.

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26:26So our next story is from Joe. The headline is, a startup is selling data hacked from people's computers to debt collectors. Joe, what is this company? Where is this data coming from? Who is it selling it to? Yes. So to give the very high level view, and of course we'll drill down on all of this, some words may not make sense immediately, but there's this company called Farnsworth Intelligence, like a private intelligence cybersecurity company. And they're taking data that has been hacked from people's computers, passwords, email addresses, billing addresses, sometimes even more information. They're then taking that from something like 50 million computers, repackaging it and selling it to skip tracers, which is a fancy term for debt collectors, basically.

27:21People going through divorce proceedings or even companies looking to poke. their rivals' customers. It's pretty audacious. I have not seen hacked data sold like this for these purposes, and that's why I pulled it out. It's a really telling story about how this data is now being viewed by the cybersecurity and the broader open-source intelligence industry as well. People don't just consider OSINT as posts on Twitter anymore. Some companies and people also consider data hacked from computers to be so-called OSINT as well. Something I think is interesting or might be useful to listeners is that we are very used to, and I'm used to it because of your reporting.

28:23But we'll find out about a giant hack of T-Mobile or something. And one of the ways we find out about it is that there's these forums where people sell this data. So people compromise a bunch of machines in various ways. All this hacked data is floating around. People compile it and then sell it in huge batches on forums. And this kind of happens fairly in the open, right? So it's like all this data is floating around all the time. We know it happens, but it's very much like criminal, underworld, black market, gray market stuff. And this is basically the same data being offered by a legitimate company, right?

29:10It's the same kind of data, or the exact same data. Yeah, and there's some nuances and how InfoSteeler data specifically is distributed, which we might get to. But broadly, yeah, that's absolutely right. You have these forums where every single day hackers are either just dumping publicly for free because they feel like it, or in many cases they're selling it as well and you have to buy credits with the underground forum to then unlock the data, then you download it, blah, blah, blah. this happens with um essentially every um data breach that ends up being public facing maybe not the ransomware stuff because there's extortion there and you know we won't publish it if you pay us that's the entire point but if you hear about a large profile breach nowadays very good chance it's posted to one of these websites as you say this company is basically taking that or similar data and then offering it to these industries.

30:12And I think that's very, very important because some people may argue, well, the data's out there, so why can't I just repackage it or whatever? I don't think a random debt collector is going to know the underground hacking forum where they can get this information. Also, it's very messy sometimes on the underground hacking forum, whereas here, Farnsworth Intelligence is taking that data, presumably cleaning it or at least formatting it in some way so it can actually appear in a search tool and making it all very easy to access and searchable specifically for these industries. If you're a divorce lawyer in some fancy tower, you know, in a big metropolitan city or whatever, and you're dealing with these big high-profile divorce cases, you don't know where to go to find that data on the internet, but you can use a private intelligence company like this to find it.

31:03So it is really funneling that data to different industries, different people, and different use cases. And that's where the issue is, basically. Yeah, what's crazy to me, and the reason I was like, you should do this story right now, definitely. And this is more editorializing than we do in the story. And I don't know, Joe, you don't have to respond to this. But to me, it felt like somebody was looking at the same community slash black market that you look at every day. And they were like, oh, there's a startup here. We can just tap into an entirely different market if we just repackage the same data for a legitimate, quote unquote, client.

31:48ends um i i do have a i think a useful way to get into that which is that more specifically this data is info stealer data and that is this really popular brand of malware or type of malware now which is often bundled with like cracked or pirated software so you download a cracked version of photoshop or whatever you're doing whatever it is you do in photoshop and then there's actually some malware in there, which was stealing everything stored in your browser. And that's going to be your passwords, email addresses, billing addresses, also just like all the autofill stuff in Chrome or whatever.

32:28And we covered this in depth. I actually spoke to the people making the malware and also spoke to somebody very senior on the Google security, Chrome security team about that and we we've published that um before but what happens there is that that data is often then fed into these telegram channels and it's often sold you have to pay to access it but then also many of the channels just freely distribute them probably to advertise the paid offering as well so to get to your point of like somebody seeing a startup here multiple companies have tapped that data in different ways. There's another company called Hudson Rock, a cybersecurity firm, and InfoSteelers is basically their entire thing.

33:17They will go in, they will bring up the data, and what they would do is they will release these free tools, or I believe paid products as well, and it's like, hey, if you're a company and you're worried about InfoSteelers, we can warn you if your company is appearing in these credentials. That's a pretty interesting and probably useful use case that's very different to going to the info stealers grabbing all and being like we're now going to sell it to debt collectors like it's entirely different it's a different question of use case and it's also different whether you can just search through the data or not as well and i should add that we're talking about the the debt collectors and whatever there is which you have to apply for you like have to tell him uh you're sorry you have to tell the company this is why i want to have access to it there is also this public facing version of it which is a little bit more of a limited data set i could still find very sensitive stuff in there and that costs like 50 bucks to just log in and there's no uh checks there you just make an account and then you're searching info stealer data which is obviously you know potentially an issue for stalkers or anybody like that yeah i mean let's get into that what did like the experts you talked to say about the potential for abuse here and some other use cases yeah i mean sort of the usual expected stuff came up which is you know this is going to be a boon to law enforcement this is going to be a boon to law enforcement as a warrant crucially uh this is going to be very very useful for stalkers that sort of thing but then specifically on the use cases i pulled out and there are other ones It's like Farnsworth Intelligence also offers it to cyber risk firms or law enforcement or anything like that.