Photo Credit: Chris Bair
Spam farms have hijacked the YouTube and Spotify profiles of numerous jazz musicians, pushing out genAI slop tracks with cover art featuring genAI anime girls.
The Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube profiles of jazz musicians like William “Sonny” Criss have been inundated with AI spam on a concerning level. Profiles of artists such as vocalist Jean Carne, cornetist Red Nichols, and clarinetist Jimmie Noone have become hosts for parasitic AI-generated content, with “new” singles posted with AI-generated cover art uploaded this year and attributed to publisher “Ami bacuk.”
For example, Criss’ Spotify profile displayed two new songs—”an impressive feat, considering he died in 1977,” Futurism notes. Both tracks feature a generic anime girl on their cover, with attributions to a composer called “Zainul Irpan,” which is simply a “mashup of two generic Arabic-rooted names.”
Each song is a jazz-inspired tune, but its origins are almost impossible to trace. Unlike a lot of AI slop, they aren’t remixes of existing tracks, either by Criss or any identifiable artist via music ID software. Were it not for the sudden influx of tracks featuring contemporary-looking anime characters on the profile of a deceased artist, it would be difficult for the layman listener to distinguish the songs from the musician’s own work.
Back in April, the publisher identified as “Ami bacuk” released four new singles attributed to Jimmie Noone, a Black Dixieland clarinetist and bandleader who has been dead since 1944. Each of these tracks—”You Have Hurt Him,” “You Have Hurt Him 2,” “He’s still there,” and “He’s still there 2″—is an unremarkable pop ballad featuring a seemingly AI-generated female vocalist. These tracks, as well as the surreal AI-generated corporate Memphis header, contrast starkly with Noone’s own sound and his profile’s black-and-white photo album covers.
R&B and jazz vocalist Jean Carne (sometimes spelled Carn) has also had her YouTube Music profile hijacked and bombarded with slop. It features many of the same signs as Criss’ YouTube page, and the music is a similarly inoffensive blend of jazz that lacks Carne’s iconic five-octave voice. The only major difference between the two cases is that Carne is still very much alive.
A Spotify spokesperson told Futurism that “the releases have been removed from the artist profiles” and that “protecting artists’ identities is a top priority for us, and we continue to invest heavily in detection and prevention.”
Spotify further highlighted its Artist Profile Protection, which has been in various stages of testing ahead of an official rollout. The feature “lets artists opt in to review and approve or decline incoming releases before they go live on their profile” but begs the question of why such a feature requires artists to opt in and isn’t just a standard practice for music streamers. In fact, artist profile hijacking on Spotify is what prompted them to release the opt-in only feature in the first place.
It’s just the latest example of how individual platforms are largely taking a reactive approach to the growing deluge of AI slop rather than a proactive one. Platforms like Spotify stand to gain more than they lose for hosting AI tracks that go undetected as such by the masses. It makes stances such as Deezer’s—which actively identifies AI tracks and removes them from the royalty pool—all the more crucial as we continue to navigate a rapidly changing landscape.
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