Artist Squatting

[jumbalooyah]

Premium

UK

'Artists' posting music on verified artists' profiles in order to infiltrate Release Radar, etc. to game plays.

You might be aware of this phenomena which has crept in over the last year. You get your Release Radar every Friday, and you get excited because some of the more obscure or dormant artists you've not heard from in years have started posting new music. But wait; it looks like a collaboration with someone I've never heard of before. And it doesn't sound anything like the music this artist would be associated with.

And then the penny drops. This new 'artist' has hijacked the popularity (or obscurity) of a dormant verified artist to propel their own content to undeserved heights. I call this 'artist squatting' but you might know it by other terms.

I've seen a combo of: Disneyland Paris Lion King Ensemble Cast (a legitimate artist with an album of music released in 2020 taken from their stage show) with some random 'artist' – chrymetverz – on a track called; 'Joint (chrymetverz Remix)'. It's an R&B/rap song... with no connection to the Disney cast at all.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5JVFPPXKYSofjLoGJDU5rh?si=33096582a2bf44ae

I've recently seen someone hi-jack Murray Gold (composer of Doctor Who scores) claiming they have co-released the recent Ncuti Gatwa-era Doctor Who theme (and others) with him [now since removed from Spotify].

https://open.spotify.com/album/7gR1k190OuwzFa0IvnVunG?si=5Yo0PrjKSqmrzZHJ37LK3A

And the other week I thought noughties synth-pop group Mojo had returned with a new song [now since removed from Spotify] 'Midnight Mirage'. This hijack was slightly different. No second artist trying to claim a colab. Instead it seems someone had managed to load a track claiming to be them (with an uncannily similar looking album art to Modjo's legitimate self-titled album). A cursory Google of Modjo reveals there has not been a murmur from them in decades.

https://open.spotify.com/album/0Uq4QxOnbf7Gpo1X01sHLb?si=mxZDiulFTJipsWQXb_zj3g

My question is; how do knowledgable and intuitive listeners like ourselves report these squatting (or hijacking) incidents effectively? At present; the current system of reporting leans into the weird territory of reporting 'financial scams' or 'bad taste'. But what I want to report in the examples above is more nuanced and dare I say, more offensive to established artists reputations, and their followers. Given the opportunity; I could dare-say write a brief report as to why I've flagged this.

I.e. This long retired artist has posted a new track this week in collaboration with another artist they have no known association with in what looks like an attempt at 'artist' squatting.

or

This song has clearly been recorded directly from a speaker at a Disney theme park and has no legal right to post this material as their own work. Their profile picture is of a teen in Anaheim pulling a pose out of a 90s gangster video – I'm talking about you; Loleshwarz.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6dzIFfelGQONZWys5S9Bpk?si=zSQcWyHxRruhMs_wcaRhig

I'm smart enough to spot a freeloader in my Release Radar – I'll reject the track never to hear it again, and hope the shysters get booted off the platform soon enough. But this is doing as much damage as the AI slop we all hate, going viral, and making money off the back of actual artists making a living.

Can Spotify make their reporting system more specific to these kinds of violations in order to help their teams spot violations better. I don't claim to represent any artist (or financial department of a record label) – I'm just a music enthusiast who can spot a red herring a mile off within the bounds of my musical sphere.

[Novy]

Hey there @jumbalooyah,

Thank you for taking the time to share all your feedback with us. We've made sure to forward the report to the relevant teams, however, we can't commit to a specific timeline for this to be addressed. 

The Community will be here if anything else comes up.

Cheers!

[andreacochran]

Hey! How do i report a false listing?? I have spent over an hour trying to figure out how to tell your team that an unknown artist is falsely listing a famous artist as being on their track? Or that whomever they tried to tag has the same name as a famous artist and therefore has been falsely linked to the famed artist’s page? I will just put the track here for now… since there doesn’t seem to be a fast easy way to get this info to the proper team…

the artist is grammy winner, JEWEL (the singer/songwriter) - she is tagged as being on this random ass song in another language that she obviously is not singing on. 

please tell me where to send things like this in the future. Thank you

 

[AlejaR]

Hey there @andreacochran,

Thanks for your reply here!

We really appreciate your comments on the matter and the time you took to let us know about this.

You can follow these steps whenever you'd like to report a song, podcast, or audiobook on Spotify that isn’t playing correctly or whose metadata does not seem accurate. You can also share the links to the songs here in the Community, and we'll pass the info onto the right team. Bear in mind that we cannot guarantee a specific timeline for this to be reviewed. 

Hope this helps! We'll be around. 

[jumbalooyah]

I think the problem is that as a community, we are very well placed to notify Spotify when interlopers or errors have appeared. The links for reporting seem only to serve rights holders and distributors (the people you're responsible for handing money too) – the impression is that as users, Spotify would rather we all just sat in the corner and dumped all our well meaning alerts into the blender of thoughts and opinions that live in the community pages rather than give us a one-click way to just say; 'hey, this has snuck in without you noticing – go take a look'.

What we're offering to do, is directly flag the content which is diluting the quality of your product significantly. All we need is a better click-through / reporting experience to do this. The benefit to Spotify would be a direct channel of flags pointing towards counterfeit listings which can then be actioned and reported on.

You wouldn't expect to walk into a music shop and see a load of bootleg songs bundled with your latest album releases. You wouldn't go to the supermarket and see a bootleg bottle of beer bundled with your six-pack. And you wouldn't go to the cinema to watch a bootleg of the latest release.

This needs sorting out quickly and efficiently, and at the moment it seems like we're all paying for a product which is littered with profiteering from bootleg artists, which will only continue to get worse if you don't start letting the people willing and able to help fight the battle with you.