What is the deal with all the fake artists on Spotify?
In 2022, controversy erupted when Capitol Records signed a new rapper named FN Meka to their label. The rapper had racked up billions (with a “B”) of views on TikTok and millions of streams on Spotify. He even had a prominent collaboration with Gunna, ‘Florida Water’, that was starting to gain traction in more mainstream music circles. There was just one problem: FN Meka didn’t actually exist.
You see, Meka was (now past tense) a “virtual rapper” whose image and music were almost entirely generated by artificial intelligence. Created by Brandon Le in 2019 for the sole purpose of peddling non-fungible tokens, Meka was then picked up by music executive Anthony Martini with an eye toward pushing artificially created musicians into the mainstream. Meka had his voice recorded by an actual human, but his lyrics, beats, melodies, and all other elements of him were AI.
Meka’s downfall came in part due to public backlash against the increased reliance on the creative uses of AI, but also largely because of accusations of cultural appropriation. The idea that FN Meka was a black avatar created by an Asian man and brought to prominence by a white guy is certainly worrisome, but it’s Meka’s status as one of the most popular non-real musicians that will be remembered as the creation’s legacy.
Meka is just one of thousands of artists whose music is on streaming platforms despite the fact that there are no real human footprints behind them. Populating the hundreds of thousands of playlists on services like Spotify are songs by artists who have no backstory, no history, and no human form. While the term “fake artist” has become popular, it’s the humans facilitating these creations and the apparent endorsement (and possible promotion) from streaming services themselves that have kicked up the real controversy.
When Music Business Worldwide found Tim Ingham appeared on The New York Times’ ‘Popcast’ in 2022, he revealed that there were alleged deals being made between Spotify and Swedish musicians to create pseudonymous music as early as 2015. The trouble comes with the massive windfall of money that both these musicians and Spotify can make through the process.
Basically, here’s how it works. Spotify (again allegedly) pays a musician a certain amount of money to create songs for 20 different artists, all released under different names and none being directly linked to the original creator. Spotify, according to some reports, allegedly prioritises those songs by including them in popular playlists. Instead of having to dish out the already meagre payment-per-stream to other musicians, they can keep the profits in-house.
Spotify has strongly denied doing any such action, but the rise of hastily put-together songs that largely sound the same has become something of a game on streaming services. Some artists, like producer Adam Faze, have assembled playlists featuring gaudy AI artwork, generic names that lead to empty pages, and lists of songs that all sound the same.
Whether Spotify is directly complicit or not, the results speak for themselves. Streaming services have now become algorithms that are meant to be broken and taken advantage of, and if someone can get a few thousand streams for the same song released under 20 different names, those numbers can quickly add up. The ethics of such practices are getting put under the microscope, but rest assured, if you’ve been wondering why your Spotify playlists are starting to sound the same, it’s not just you.
