‘It has your name on it, but I don’t think it’s you’: how AI is impersonating musicians on Spotify

Fraudulent music streams have long been a scourge for the industry, but experts say generative AI has supercharged it

J

ason Moran, a renowned jazz composer and pianist, got a strange call from a friend last month. The friend, bassist Burniss Earl Travis, was curious about Moran’s new record that he saw on the music streaming service Spotify.

“It has your name on it,” Travis told him. “But I don’t think it’s you.”

Moran said he doesn’t use Spotify or put his music on the platform, preferring only to use the site Bandcamp, so this didn’t track. After some investigating, he found an artist profile bearing his name on Spotify, which was populated with albums from his former label, Blue Note Records, which owns the rights to his early music. There he saw a new EP titled For You. Its album cover was done in a moody Japanese anime style and depicted a young woman sitting on the ground in the rain. He gave it a listen.