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Release Radar includes wrong artist with same name as desired artist

Release Radar includes wrong artist with same name as desired artist

I constantly find my Release Radar recommending songs by an artist (say A) with the same name as an artist (say A') that I might actually wanna listen to. This is extremely dumb as an issue because these two artists are listed as genuinely different artists in Spotify and the newly recommended song by a wrong artist is listed as a song of A' in the system. A reasonable conclusion is that at least Release Radar does not look into the artist IDs but just merely refers to their names. This happens to like 5 different artists to me and my Release Radar is contaminated by songs which I have absolutely no interest in. I believe this is a very basic bug that can be fixed in like 5 minutes.

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This week we have Green River, a jazz band using the name of Green River the grunge band, and The OBGM's, another **bleep** hip hop group. Tell me that one is a coincidence?

How on earth do you guys let this go on? Seriously?

Yeah, this is lunacy. How do we escalate this past Spotify who have made it very clear that not only do they not care about their paying customers, but they don't even seem to care about the artists themselves.

There should be somewhere to report these trademark infringements outside of Spotify.

Ok, this is just ridiculous! 

The band Tonic.... a great band from 1993 with awesome hits like "If you could only see," suddenly shows up on my Release Radar singing in a foreign language (Japanese? Mandarin?). This artist Tonic is NOT the awesome band I mention in the previous sentence.

 

Correct Tonic: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6qXwLwTLdA44HYsA26vaNU?si=erJsdZQaS6ea4AxI4eOdhw

 

Wrong Tonic: https://open.spotify.com/artist/09mQ334wKz424dnCABYM9q?si=LY-2_NrATDCbr2ZhDGNN-Q

 

This is getting extremely annoying. I had like 6 songs this week that were all from these garbage little rap artists "featuring" famous bands in their songs. Something seriously needs to be done about this. Maybe put in an option to actually report these artists or something so they can be dealt with.

you would think that spotify and the majority of people would care right? 😄

Made a video about it couple of month ago, nobody cared so far haha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5vmPZmC0i4

honestly though I think spotify should really get their bottom up from the chair. this would probably take a good programmer half a day....

I got a Portuguese song featuring "Pantera" this week.

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Some music distributors allow artists to choose the correct artist URI for their releases.

 

CD Baby, Catapult, Tunecore, Distrokid, Symphonic, Emubands.

====

I have also contacted Spotify to merge a few artist profiles or move a song to the correct profile.

Screenshot_20210206-171718_Spotify.jpg

 oh look! X just released a new single... oh wait

Hey everyone,

 

Thanks again for taking the time to report this issue to us.

 

 We want to again look into this, but we need your help to gather some information.

 

Please provide us with URIs of artists that appear in your Release Radar and are not the ones you follow. You can find instructions on how to bring up a Spotify URI here.

 

What's important for us to also understand is, if at the time of your release radar, both artists had their dedicated artist page, so please highlight this in your posts.

Thanks! We’ll keep you posted and let you know as soon as we have any updates on this.

Mihail Moderator
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spotify:album:58iM860XpY6GuNYw7s8Crg

 

somene is using the identity of Kansas!! Unbelievable!!

here

kansasFAKE.JPG

Hi @jakegerb.

 

Your example is a case not of someone trying to use the identity of the classic rock band Kansas, but that of another, smaller artist, who has chosen to have the same artist name, to have their track wrongly uploaded on Kansas, the classic rock band's artist profile.

 

The upload of music on Spotify is handled by different distributors and is mostly automated. Errors like the above can happen if a distributor does not follow our guidelines and mixes up metadata and other unique identifiers, that allow for the Spotify app to correctly create artist pages and add tracks to those.

 

Due to the necessity to have automated systems that distributors can use, we can't prevent this from happening, but we have a dedicated team that quickly addresses any reports regarding this and corrects them. For this to happen, please submit a report as mentioned before. Detailed steps on how to do so can be found under "Broken or incorrect content" on our support page.

 

We still want to look into complaints about the Release Radar containing tracks by artists with the same name, who don't fall in the above category and have their own, separate artist pages. For everyone submitting future reports, please differentiate between the two types of issues as solving this will only be possible if we're clearly able to single those out.

Mihail Moderator
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And once again this week I have several songs "featuring" famous groups. I'm pretty dang sure Enigma is not collaborating with these rappers that have less than 1000 listeners. Please fix this already.

 

Here's this song supposedly "featuring" the kpop group Beast: https://open.spotify.com/track/01gWavZgEvGVEALf03Eptf?si=Xod5LzanR4u03bxVePQ6kw

This one "featuring" Enigma: https://open.spotify.com/track/11xk33xJTF3R6kUzPJfPdf?si=XRe1D6bgS_yMkgZGOhSdrQ

Another "featuring" jpop artist Kaya: https://open.spotify.com/track/4bkTDhXEgFwAq4ZJJqHT6L?si=CrpNsGfTRb2G0RCrG4c3Kg

"Featuring" SIAMES: https://open.spotify.com/track/5YNxP9JCF3g7xY4KdyTW1N?si=bH5vhOCUQGq3jqwOwiMY4w

This rap garbage "featuring" Koda: https://open.spotify.com/track/4YwptGvjgwyBlrYO8U95Jz?si=PZ6Pwmc7RMCxBoblf5ProQ

And finally this "featuring" HYDE: https://open.spotify.com/track/77fgYvrPjz8CnJdSZrgCBh?si=PuOZtdTiTfe7nB_VeVXdqQ

 

This is just what I've gotten in my release radar this week. I have this many or more each week and it's only gotten worse.

Hi @datfenristho.

 

similar to what was mentioned above, this seems to be an issue of small, featured artists, that don't even seem to have an artist page on Spotify, getting incorrectly associated in their metadata with bigger artists.

 

Our team that corrects errors like this should be able to help here. Please follow the mentioned steps to report it.

 

If you come across any tracks in your Release Radar of same-named artists, that both have artist pages with us, please add these examples here so we can check those.

Mihail Moderator
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@mihail a while ago this pseudo-DARKSIDE spotify:artist:6O5oIuGZUzfr0BChQWO5mF appeared in my release radar while I follow only the real one: spotify:artist:2933wDUojoQmvqSdTAE5NB

 

Those are distinct artists. Not only in reality, but also in Spotify's URI world. What I don't get is why Spotify cross-references artists based on their name. Somewhere someone at Spotify wrote a line of code that's like `if following_artist.name == new_release.artist.name { addToReleaseRadar(new_release) }`. You can blame all the labels and third parties messing up their submissions to Spotify, but as long as you guys cross reference based on an ambiguous identifier (name), then this is not going to be solved ever.

@mihail more:

 

Immortal: fake: spotify:artist:168eCh2SO4aVvmP2OCDgqE following: spotify:artist:2mVTkiwfm4ic6DnHpmFq8K
Cream: fake: spotify:artist:3VOANNOubuLKvbLoTcpOFA following: spotify:artist:74oJ4qxwOZvX6oSsu1DGnw

 

The fake ones appeared in my release radar the last months, the real ones I follow (or I've liked their songs)

Hey @rollulus,

 

Thanks for those, that's what we're looking for!

 

We'll gather these and pass on for investigation. Keep 'em coming if you spot more. It would be best if we catch some of the actual tracks while your Release Radar has not yet updated.

 

 

Mihail Moderator
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@mihail I hope you are using these references as a starting point, and you aren't expecting us users to report every single instance of these artists?

So we have to go through and fill out a form for every individual song that's incorrect because you guys have a busted app greeeeaat. Can we have a thread or something to do this instead because that's ridiculous, especially when some people have nearly their entire release radar filled up with these fake songs. They'd have to submit 20+ individual reports every week. Or hey you guys could even add an in app option for this. Would also be nice if you guys could find out why this has become such an issue because this didn't used to happen. Only started happening when the fake artist junk started.

The following artists popped up on my release radar despite not following any of them. Hope you guys can fix this soon as the feature is pretty unusable right now.

 

spotify:track:03B2SfXuvDh1m9F4tqrX07

spotify:track:7EMc3KIY60Msh1mY9mlHcJ

spotify:track:3HSqZn7jeB9wspEv73rmur

spotify:track:6qOBLMMgiW0HxHYhPFO8Hr

spotify:track:2vDdWinbd6nX42c3cSgOge

spotify:track:5AxJu9P4DNhgAjcehvOGra

spotify:track:4kS22b507V23DqWKrPzKpB

spotify:track:75YWTfd4FYpsY2Pbsh0SUY

spotify:track:1eGjD4jCwDM8mPBKtHgKOf

spotify:track:3SVGCQOwxQYhgtpdkMj1ml

spotify:track:7LXiDtfy9omcKaAAyGdrRM

@jeremycorbett Not entirely sure which of the two types of instances that are mentioned here you mean. If it's about artists who don't have their own Spotify page but have the same name as others - as mentioned, for now we can only fix this after it is spotted by the team taking care of that or a report is submitted to them. A report will most certainly help resolve it faster. If you're talking about artists with individual Spotify pages incorrectly being added to the Release Radar, because you follow another artist with the same name - we will need a good set of reports of those as well in order to get to the bottom of the issue. Only with reliable data and the cooperation from affected users can we tackle those issues that we aren't able to reproduce ourselves.

 

@datfenristho I'm assuming you are referring to scenario 1 here, so I'll do my best to reply based on that assumption. Do consider that we're talking about a combination of technical limitations and human error.

Each day, a myriad of new songs are added to Spotify. In order for us to enable all artists, big or small, established or upcoming, global or regional, to easily add their music to our service so their fans can enjoy them, we have created a system that allows for distributors to facilitate this. Тhere're checks put in place and unique identifiers for each artist to ensure that the correct content is associated with its correct place in the app. These identifiers however need to be verified by those who add the music to the system. A machine cannot listen to a track so that it understands that "Artist SameNameB" is not actually "Artist SameNameA". It double checks if the name matches and if the unique ID provided matches and then does its thing. Unless we somehow take the human error away and are able to teach the system to differentiate the music itself, there really isn't much we can do to prevent this from happening.

 

We don't recommend a thread about this here in the Community, as our team really can't action these reports. It needs to be submitted via the way described so it reaches the right folks. From the reports we already see, it seems that on average, when there are such instances, it's 1 or 2 in the affected Release Radar. We're not saying that these aren't 2 instances too many, but it should be something that can be quickly reported. Only when working together can we quickly remedy this.

 

Regarding an in-app option: This is something we're actually exploring, but aren't at a stage where we can say that "yep, that's coming for sure!". As for why it didn't use to happen as often before - previously, featured artists weren't fully integrated, so they didn't influence any of the main artist pages. This is only judging by anecdotal observations, but it seems adding this integration has caused the increase in errors such as these.

@Beatalls - thanks for submitting those. Just to clarify, are those artists with the same name as ones you follow or just artists that you don't know? Please be aware that the Release Radar does indeed feature many artists that you don't follow, but the app thinks you might enjoy based on several factors. (If you don't, make sure to use the Hide feature to improve future suggestions.) In this thread we'll only be gathering examples, such as the ones submitted by rollulus.

Mihail Moderator
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