Musicians on the mystery of fraudsters releasing songs in their name | UK News

Last month, award-winning singer Emily Portman got a message from a fan praising her new album and saying “English folk music is in good hands”.

That would normally be a compliment, but the Sheffield-based artist was puzzled.

So she followed a link the fan had posted and was taken to what appeared to be her latest release. “But I didn’t recognise it because I hadn’t released a new album,” Portman says.

“I clicked through and discovered an album online everywhere – on Spotify and iTunes and all the online platforms.

“It was called Orca, and it was music that was evidently AI-generated, but it had been cleverly trained, I think, on me.”

The 10 tracks had names such as Sprig of Thyme and Silent Hearth – which were “uncannily close” to titles she might choose. It was something that Portman, who won a Folk Award in 2013, found “really creepy”.

When she clicked to listen, the voice – supposedly hers – was a bit off but sang in “a folk style probably closest to mine that AI could produce”, she says. The instrumentation was also eerily similar.

While AI-generated music is rife online, it’s often released under fictitious names, or imitates big stars, but it doesn’t normally appear on their official streaming pages.

There’s now a growing trend, though, for established (but not superstar) artists to be targeted by fake albums or songs that suddenly appear on their pages on Spotify and other streaming services. Even dead musicians have had AI-generated “new” material added to their catalogues.

Portman doesn’t know who put the album up under her name or why. She was falsely credited as performer, writer and copyright holder. The producer listed in the credits was Freddie Howells – but she says that name doesn’t mean anything to her, and there’s no trace online of a producer or musician of that name.

As for the music itself, while it was enough to convince some fans, the lack of actual human creative input made it sound “vacuous and pristine”, she says.

“I’ll never be able to sing that perfectly in tune. And that’s not the point. I don’t want to. I’m human.”

A few days later, another album popped up on Portman’s streaming pages. This time, less effort had been made to emulate her. It was “20 tracks of instrumental drivel”, she says. “Just AI slop.”

She filed copyright complaints to get the albums taken down, and says the episode has redoubled her “belief in the importance of real creativity, and how it moves people”.

“I hope that the AI music didn’t do that for people,” she continues. “Although I did get an email from somebody saying, ‘Where’s Orca? That’s been on repeat.’ So people have been hoodwinked by it.”

Whoever posted the albums online will receive any royalties, but no song on Orca had more than 2,000 plays on Spotify – so the revenue wouldn’t have exceeded $6 (£4.40) per track.

According to music industry analysts Luminate, about 99,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services every day, usually via dozens of distribution services, which ask the uploader to submit the artist’s details.

If that information is incorrect, and a song wrongly gets listed under an existing artist’s name, it’s down to them or their label to complain and get it removed.

Portman says some platforms were quick to remove Orca from their platforms, but Spotify took three weeks, and she still hasn’t regained control of her Spotify artist profile.

In a statement, Spotify said: “These albums were incorrectly added to the wrong profile of a different artist by the same name, and were removed once flagged.”

Portman questions that. Although there is another singer of the same name on Spotify, the albums didn’t sound like her and haven’t since been added to her profile.

She says the “distressing” experience feels like “the start of something pretty dystopian” – and also highlights a lack of legal safeguards for artists.

She suspects independent artists are being targeted because star names have more protection and more power to get fraudulent releases removed swiftly.

Like Portman, New York-based musician, producer and songwriter Josh Kaufman, who played on Taylor Swift’s Folklore album, was alerted to fake new material by his listeners.

“I just started getting messages from fans and friends about some new music I just released, and how much of a shift it was [stylistically],” he says.

“I think most people were hip to the fact that it was somebody else just using my artist profile as a way to release some strange music that clearly was computer generated.”

In Kaufman’s case, his identity had been used to release a track called Someone Who’s Love Me, which sounded like “a Casio keyboard demo with broken English lyrics”.

“It was embarrassing and then just kind of confusing,” he adds. “This [music] is the thing that we do, right? This is the signature of our soul, and that someone else can walk in there and just have access like that…”

He’s one of a number of Americana and folk-rock artists who have had fake tracks posted using their names in recent weeks – apparently all from the same source.

Others include Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, J Tillman (now known as Father John Misty), Sam Beam (aka Iron & Wine), Teddy Thompson and Jakob Dylan.

All the releases used the same style of AI artwork and were credited to three record labels, two with apparently Indonesian names. Many listed the same name as a songwriter – Zyan Maliq Mahardika.

That name has also been credited on other songs mimicking real US Christian musicians and metalcore bands.

Spotify said it had flagged the issue with the distributor and removed these tracks as they “violated our policy against impersonating another person or brand.”

It added it would “remove any distributor who repeatedly allows this type of content on our platform”.

Kaufman made a playlist of all the tracks he could find and gave it a derogatory name. “It’s more fun to laugh about it than to feel bad about it,” he says. “But it is disconcerting that this can happen.”

And it was strange to him, as a musician and producer who generally goes “under the radar”, to be targeted. “Why not go for someone big?” he asks. “If you’re trying to accumulate royalties of some kind.”

Where any royalties may have gone, he has no idea. “I don’t even know what the enemy is, to be honest,” he says. “Is it a computer? Is it a person sitting somewhere developing this music to just mess with someone?”

One thing is for sure – he wants companies such as Spotify to be more proactive about preventing fraudulent music appearing on their platforms.

Tatiana Cirisano from media and technology analysis company Midia Research says AI is “making it easier for fraudsters” to fool listeners, who are also more “passive” in the algorithmic age.

She thinks bad actors posing as real-life artists are hoping their fraudulent tracks will “rack up enough streams” – hundreds of thousands – to earn them a nice payday.

“I would think that the AI fakes are targeting lesser-known artists in the hopes that their schemes fly under the radar, compared to if they were to target a superstar who could immediately get Spotify on the line,” she notes.

But streaming services and distributors are “working hard” and getting better at spotting it, she stresses, “ironically, also by using AI and machine learning!

“I think it’s clear to everyone that every stakeholder must do their part,” she says. “But it’s complicated.”

When a new song appeared last month on US country singer Blaze Foley’s verified artist page, it came as a big surprise to Craig McDonald, owner of Foley’s record label – not least because Foley died in 1989.

The “AI schlock”, as McDonald puts it, was evidently not in Foley’s “Texas singer-songwriter from the heart” style.

“Blaze had a songwriting talent but along with that talent, a total authenticity,” he says. “As they say, three chords and the truth. And this clearly wasn’t it.”

McDonald, who runs Lost Art Records, is concerned AI dupes could damage the credibility of artists like Foley, especially for people who don’t know their sound.

What would Foley have made of all this? “Blaze might have liked it because the photo that accompanied it really slimmed him down, it took off about 30lb and also gave him a modern haircut,” McDonald laughs.

“But he would also say, ‘I want that 10% of a penny that Spotify is collecting. Send that my way’.”

Considering how the streaming era has already made a big dent in many artists’ incomes, Emily Portman says this affair has felt like a “very low blow”.

As well as attempting to tackle her faceless AI impostor, she is now recording her first (real) solo album for 10 years – which, unlike AI, takes time, money and deep personal creativity. She says it will cost at least £10,000 to make, to pay the people who play on, produce, release and promote it.

But the result, she enthuses, will be something genuine and human.

“I’m really looking forward to bringing some real music into the world!”