Comment by alexjplant
2 days ago
Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. They also routinely allow bedroom EDM and trap producers to associate their releases with older artists just because they have the same name. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to respond to these egregious cases of misclassification. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down.
Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so.
And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
> Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform
FWIW, so does BC. Stuff gets eventually deleted, but last year there was a leaked pirated copy of an album for sale for over a week, over a month before release.
Yeah, I have another horror story there. An old classmate of mine became a nationally well known jazz guitarist in my country (she regularly makes various foreign top ten lists in niche publications too.) Her albums were on Bandcamp, but I thought something seemed fishy so I asked her if that was really her. "I haven't heard of that but I have to ask the record company". It wasn't them.
It had been there for years and hundreds of people had paid for it.