Who The Heck Are All of These Artists?!

[Eclipse_31]

Whilst searching for songs and curating a certain playlist, from time to time I's encounter these strange tracks:

As you can see, these artists follow a similar pattern:

• With the exception of a few such as 'Dreamtail', 'Noolanda', or 'Wadoru', all of the artists have a first and last name.
• Listeners and followers of these artists are around the 100 - 10,000 range.
• All releases by these artists are singles and/or EPs.
• Album covers and artist portraits are stock photos that have absolutely nothing to do with the songs (eg. 'Merifat Holm' by Brett Griffiths shows a rather determined boxer, yet the song is a rather relaxing jazz piece).
• Song titles either refer to a person or a location.
• Songs seem to be very short, ranging from about 50 seconds to almost 2 minutes.
• Artist discography is EXTREMELY SMALL, with about 1-5 songs for each artist.
• Songs seem to cover a wide variety of instrumental genres: piano, world, funk, jazz, etc., but tend to be repetitive, have a low-quality, laggy, 'glitched-out' sound, and end abruptly.
• Different songs by two different artists will be exactly the same (eg. 'Hingdiac Mountain Path' by Piper Jackson and 'Hingfell Wood by Steller Parker'; 'Mobeoprin Island' by Logan Stevens, 'The Bland Ait' by Gale George, and 'Giant Wilds' by Harriet Lowe)
• Source for most of these artists in song credits is 'SKY TECH DISTRIBUTION' - nothing music-related comes up when I Google this.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1P7hda1DZHq45zNNAVrKUv?si=h-Mcc8gnTd6e2EbZq0FyVw

Above is a playlist I made of many songs by these weirdos. You can check them out if you'd like. If anyone knows what exactly's going on here with these artists and if they can be reported for spam, I'd love to know as soon as possible.

[MadeinGuate]

I have the same problem with 1 of my bands, they just uploaded 5 songs with their names.

[sashamuller]

Just noticed the same thing the other day. Did you ever work out what all this filler music was?

I wondered if it was a cunning way of making money from Spotify or something. The tracks are nonsense musically, but tonally they do kind of fit into the playlists I've encountered them in (techno, electro, anything with repetitive grooves), so wondered if that was a conscious decision in order to get the algo to pick them up for radio playlists etc

[Paha_Agentti]

And there is also lots of these Asian "artists" that release 10+ EP's/year with six 1:20 long (nonsense) songs on each and Spotify algorithm seems to like them quite a lot.

See discussion here: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/Android-Radio-Algorithm-chooses-too-many-Short-songs/m...

[Paha_Agentti · Accepted solution]

Maybe related to this: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2022/03/29/spotify-fake-artists-investigation/

[Eclipse_31]

Thank you for bringing more attention to this. As someone who enjoys discovering and listening to older, if somewhat obscure music, it saddens me that these hacks are are able to have their souless ambience ready to play whilst thousands, if not millions of artists old and new, could potentially find a new life in the streaming world. I have been looking at the posted article links and have started blocking mentioned artists; I think this is a good way to show Spotify we don't care - don't just ignore them, BLOCK these ""artists"".

Alas, there are far too many of these hacks that the time spent blocking them could be used for more important and productive activities. Now, I do wonder if there's an addon/API service floating around the internet that could be used to block these fake artists en masse . . .

[Gurrra]

Yeah I'm getting more and more of this**bleep**. First time I noticed this I got four tracks in a row that was almost exactly the same, it was just a sliight difference in timbre or whatever and with a bit different lengths (ranging from 1 to 3 minutes) and names, and with random AI generated album art. Then during the same evening I found more of the same and put it in a playlist that I screenshotted and then removed again to try and not get it to contaminate my algorithm even more. So in my attached screenshot the first eight tracks is the exact same one, and the two last are the same.

Spotify SERIOUSLY have to do something about this, not only kill everything with fire from their server, but also a good way for us users to report them or at least give us the option to block artists.

[Eclipse_31]

There actually IS an option to block an artist's songs from playing and appearing, but you have to do this manually by going to their profile, tapping or clicking on the three small dots below their name, and then tap, "Don't play this artist". This is especially helpful when it comes to artists whom you find detestable, such as the lad above, whom I am still surprised is still up on Spotify in spite of his horrendous views on race and civlization.

Sadly, there aren't any websites (that I know of, at least) that allow you to block every single artist of a certain genre of music.

[Paha_Agentti]

For some reason that "Don't play this artist" option seems to be only in phone app.

[Paha_Agentti]

These two (obviously fake artist) songs on my "Discover Weekly" today were actually exactly the same song. This sort of thing is really ruining these playlists. I'm glad that there are other options, like Deezer.

[acidnbass]

I came here after experiencing so many of these tracks over the past 6 or 7

months.  Autogenerated Spotify radio is almost useless to me now as a third to two thirds of the tracks it will play will be these BS 1-minute AI generated songs.  It truly feels like Ensh*ttification happening at a rapid rate.  My Discover Weekly has drastically become derelict with these tracks peppered in like some sort of plague.  Not gonna lie it feels very dystopian.  Any new ways to prevent this from happening? 

[coredump42]

I am reporting every suspicious songs and artists as well as any attempt of exploitation of existing artists. I hope that will do.