By David Segal, New York Times | The guys in Bad Dog, a folkie duo from Washington, D.C., weren’t hoping to get rich off the album they recorded this summer. David Post and Craig Blackwell have been devoted amateurs for decades, and they’re long past dreams of tours and limos. Mostly they wanted a CD to give away at a house party in December.
Bad Dog, a group from D.C., was forced to take a crash course in streaming fraud, a shadowy realm that costs musicians $2 billion a year.
The New York Times published an article about a new type of scam in which thieves steal recorded song files from SoundCloud to upload to streaming services, claiming the songs and monetizing them as their own songs – re-titled and using fake artist names controlled by the thieves.
The original artists are then barred from uploading their own songs to the streaming services since the services now think the recordings belong to someone else.
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But not long after “The Jukebox of Regret” was finished in July and posted on SoundCloud, nearly every song on it somehow turned up on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and at least a dozen other streaming platforms. This might have counted as a pleasant surprise, except for a bizarre twist: Each song had a new title, attached to the name of a different artist.
This mysterious switcheroo might have gone unnoticed. But by happenstance, it was discovered when the guy who produced the album posted one of the songs on his studio’s Instagram account. To his astonishment, Instagram automatically tagged the song “Preston” by Bad Dog as a song called “Drunk the Wine” by Vinay Jonge — a “musician” with no previous songs and zero profile on . . .
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Read the full article here – The article is behind a paywall but a brief excerpt is shown here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/business/music-streaming-fraud-spotify.html
[Thanks to Jamie Krutz for submitting this article. https://www.jamiekrutz.com]
Photo: SoundCloud logo
Their Songs Were Stolen by Phantom Artists. They Couldn’t Get Them Back.
