Words by TimelandIsWacky, artwork by Jorclank

The Last Migration

Back in July King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard made the decision to remove their music from Spotify as part of an ongoing boycott against the platform after its then-CEO Daniel Ek invested $600 million into a military defense company called Helsing AI, making him a chairman. The band's self-removal was a largely publicized event with multiple media outlets covering their decision, and many interviewers asking the band how they came to the decision. A clear dichotomy between Gizzard and Spotify emerged, one which would only intensify in December. Reports of a strange AI Gizzard impersonator on Spotify caught the eye of these outlets, and many would publish articles talking about the incident. It’s one of the biggest stories regarding the band this year, one which has caused a significant amount of discourse about streaming, generative AI, and the state of the music industry at large. Stu’s claim that “we are truly doomed” only made the stakes that much higher.

What’s striking about the coverage, however, is that they only captured the tip of the iceberg. King Lizard Wizard was not the first to impersonate the band, and the entire debacle around it never got to the heart of the problem. While it is unfair to expect mainstream journalists to know every little detail of a band as prolific as King Gizzard, let alone all the complications of something as hard to quantify as music streaming, it’s difficult to feel that they captured the entire story when you know the details they missed. To understand it, one must take a step back and examine the entire picture. What you’ll find is a string of incidents regarding King Gizzard over the span of three months, all of which exploited some failing in streaming’s infrastructure to try and make some cash. With this, it becomes clear that this isn’t a Spotify vs King Gizzard fight, or even a problem of AI alone, but a massive foundational issue that streaming has yet to deal with.

Audereus

Back in October Spotify listeners noticed that King Gizzard’s music was returning to the platform, an odd occurrence given the band’s recent boycott. However, when clicking on the tracks, they were met with AI-generated music with cryptic artwork as covers. The tracks were also credited to the band with accurate release years (though not release dates). The two most notable examples of this were “Slow Jam 1” and “Shanghai.” Both can be traced back to Audereus and kodylayt. These are verified accounts with millions of monthly listeners. This number has only increased since October, as when I first checked in on them kodylayt brought in 500,000 monthly listeners while Audereus was at two million. When looking at their discographies, you see noticeable overlap between the two, but you also find other artists that are similar and are constantly collaborating, suggesting it could be a collective of artists. If this was the case, however, they have no online presence. Despite bringing in millions of listens, Audereus, kodylayt, SXZDU and others have no social media or any discernible info. There isn’t a trace of them online.

Well, not quite. I was able to find some footprints on other platforms, and those give some valuable context to this. I found a post on r/eurovision discussing fake Eurovision covers from Audereus with release dates years prior, similar to what happened with King Gizzard. Interestingly, this cover version approach might be newer as there are multiple uploads of tracks under the Audereus name which are direct reuploads of preexisting recordings. Highlights include “Clubbed To Death” by Rob Dougan, “Sdp Interlude” by Travis Scott, and “Jocelyn Flores” by XXXTENTACION. The cover art and artist profile pictures are also suspect, with reverse image searches showing the images dating years prior to these uploads.

Jayilor

Jayilor, another verified account with over a million monthly listeners, operated in a similar way to Audereus. Their singles, with similarly edgy and unoriginal cover art, replaced the official tracks on King Gizzard’s page. Whether they are one and the same is up for debate, though the lack of collaborators is an interesting difference. It’s unclear how widespread this plan was as all of the tracks I’ve read about come from Phantom Island and Flight b741, with “Le Risque” being the only one I could still track down (side note: the release date for the song is off the mark by two years). Jayilor also has less of an online footprint than Audereus and their collaborators, with only a handful of links outside of Spotify.

While not as prominent as others, Jayilor’s scheme marks the first time that a King Gizzard impersonator made news coverage. Casey Newton’s article for Platformer called Spotify's doppelgänger problem made the rounds within the community and remains the only real documentation of the event. The article also provides the first comment by Spotify on Gizzard’s impersonators, saying that it “wasn’t immediately caught through the usual checks” because the band had left the platform. The tracks were most likely taken down around the time of the article’s publication.

King Lizard Wizard

King Lizard Wizard uploaded their first EP to streaming services on November 7th and had hit feeds around that time, with the earliest r/KGATLW post coming on November 9th. Multiple people had reported the account on the subreddit throughout the month, with many wondering how it was up to begin with. The biggest breakthrough came when a user on r/music made a post about the account on December 8th, saying that it had been pushed through Spotify’s release radar. This was confirmed by a commenter who said the same thing. This post garnered the attention of multiple major media outlets who reported on it the same day. Spotify removed the tracks from the platform shortly after coverage broke, though the music remained up on other platforms like YouTube and Amazon Music. A Spotify representative told The Music that “Spotify strictly prohibits any form of artist impersonation. The content in question was removed for violating our policies, and no royalties were paid out for any streams generated.” Stu responded to the outlet by saying that he was trying to find the irony in the situation but was ultimately pessimistic: “But seriously wtf we are truly doomed.”

While this was a breakthrough moment in regards to thwarting these impersonators, key details were missed in this coverage. Some outlets correctly reported it as an account using the band’s titles and lyrics but they missed that the songs were clear variations on the originals with riffs and time signatures in common. Many outlets reported King Lizard Wizard in relation to the band’s Spotify boycott, and while that’s important, the issue is much larger and spans just about every platform. In other cases journalists missed the finer details altogether. For instance, when The Guardian reported on it they mentioned how Spotify takes quick action against these tracks without acknowledging that King Lizard Wizard was up for an entire month, was part of a string of AI impersonators, and that they were only taken down right as other outlets began to report on it. The wider story was missed.

Interestingly, there are a few differences between King Lizard Wizard’s and Audereus’ and Jayilor’s schemes. While they benefited from flaws in Spotify’s system which positioned their tracks as the official ones, King Lizard Wizard ended up getting its own artist page on streaming platforms. It credited Stu for songwriting but the AI tracks never appeared on the official page. While Audereus and Jayilor released singles with mysterious (and most likely stolen) album art, King Lizard Wizard dropped two self-titled five song EPs, both of which had the same AI-generated cover (you could argue this is also stolen, but I digress).

Because of the individual artist pages, we have some statistics for the “band.” According to Spotify it had 29,303 monthly listeners at the time of its removal, though it would strangely jump to 34,062 monthly listeners days after it was taken down. When I initially added up the views on YouTube, I counted that the videos had a total of 3,282 views, while the channel view count was a bit under 3,000. Almost a week later, that number had jumped to 7,226 views with around 7,204 channel views. Complicating the matter further is a second Spotify account. This one doesn’t have any releases on its page but somehow has 561 monthly listeners. My guess is that it hosted music for a short amount of time but it was blocked or deleted, while the page itself was never deactivated. This is supported by the four playlists in the “discovered on” tab, all of which have one missing song.

These metrics might seem small in comparison to the real King Gizzard’s streaming numbers, or even those of Audereus and Jayilor, but it’s a large following for something as fake as this. These are numbers that up-and-coming artists would love to have.

Fuck The System

There are a lot of questions surrounding these three instances due to the lack of info about these accounts and a lack of transparency about the systems that govern streaming. It’s also hard to verify anything regarding the songs themselves when they are getting removed. At some point we’re just left guessing. Many theories focus blame towards Spotify despite the accounts appearing on other services, possibly stemming from the way it was reported. Some theories propose that the company created the tracks (either by themselves or, more likely, by commission), uploaded them and pushed them through playlists to gain revenue for themselves. Similar accusations have been around since the 2010s and have been levied by multiple sources.

There are facets of this accusation that I do find intriguing regarding these accounts. Notably, Audereus, kodylayt and Jayilor have all appeared on official Spotify playlists at one point or another, at least based on the “discovered on” tab. It makes you wonder given the suspicious practices of these three accounts. That said, I’m not sure that I’m convinced of it here. There are multiple points of the “ghost artist” theory that are either left unanswered in this case or just don’t work.

For example, if the point is to help Spotify, why are these fake artists also on other platforms? You could argue it's to open up the revenue pool, but my question then is how much these schemes actually make. Streaming services create their revenue via a pro rata model, where the money is added into one total. From there, the service takes a cut and the rest is split between composers and distributors based on the percentage of streams. This could be a decent endeavor for Spotify on their own platform, but on something like YouTube Music, where artists make even less than they do with other services and where Spotify wouldn’t take a cut at the start, there’s very little money to be made. Perhaps if it's multiplied across multiple artists and platforms then some sort of profit could theoretically be made, but that’s a lot of work for what is ultimately raking a few thousand streams outside of Spotify.

You also have to grapple with what the ghost artist accusations have been up to this point. It’s not that Spotify is making fake versions of bands, or even fake versions of already existing material, it’s that they’re making filler content for playlists. Liz Pelly’s article about these accusations The Ghosts In The Machine notes that Spotify’s own internal research indicates most listeners aren’t going for albums or artists, but instead general playlists, and that the partnerships are filling that demand in particular. This is a different situation. If Spotify was somehow confirmed to be a part of all of this, it would be a significant escalation from where things are currently. It would be a platform performing copyright infringement while violating the band’s right of publicity across multiple platforms.

Beyond all of this, the irony is that King Lizard Wizard, the one which prompted the most accusations, never ended up on an official playlist. In fact, it’s the worst performing account of all of the ones discussed here. At the very least, King Lizard Wizard doesn’t fall into this theory.

The sad reality of our current music landscape is that average people have the means to exploit artists through streaming. It’s not something defined by one platform, and as these accounts have shown us, it’s not even defined by one method. Anyone who sees an artist as something they can profit from has easy ways of doing so through distribution services like Distrokid (which Spotify has a stake in, by the way).

You do not need two-factor authentication, let alone a password, to upload tracks to an artist’s page. This is something that was demonstrated long before the recent string of AI uploads. Before the existence of the bootleg gizzard accounts, third parties were uploading the band’s official bootleg releases to streaming services despite their policy not allowing these uploads. By doing so these third parties would monopolize the revenue, with Gizzard getting nothing despite putting in all of the work. While the band would issue takedown notices for these uploads, it showed how the lack of verification can exploit artists (it also showed how it can erode trust, as when bootleg gizzard was created it was initially seen as yet another third party trying to capitalize on the band, though the lack of communication from Gizzard themselves also played a part in the problem). King Gizzard recognized this lack of verification as an issue earlier this year, signing a petition urging streaming services to create an authentication system for artists (watch the embedded video Operation Clown Dump for a hilarious explanation on how it's done). It’s up to artists to protect themselves through takedown notices, but even then the infrastructure is inadequate. As Paul Bender of Hiatus Kaiyote and The Sweet Enoughs notes in that petition, it took him eight weeks to take down four fake tracks from all streaming platforms. We can look at King Lizard Wizard as an example. It appeared on November 7th and was taken down by Spotify a full month later on December 8th. That’s bad enough but remember that it suspiciously happened the same day outlets started to pick up on the story, and that this process now has to be done on other streaming services. It took a month for Spotify alone to remove the tracks, while YouTube, Amazon, etc. have yet to do so as of writing. None of this gets into the new type of exploitation we saw with Audereus and Jayilor where fake tracks were somehow being recognized as the official ones. I’ve yet to find an explanation of how it even happened.

While streaming platforms have been introducing new ways to try and combat fraudulent songs, they are far from actually fighting it. Systems which allow fake tracks to be uploaded in a short amount of time without any verification but take eight weeks to remove them while not investigating artists who are suspicious on multiple fronts are not ones that actually help artists.

There’s certainly a lot of fear around what AI-generated music means for art, technology, our environment and the core foundations of truth, and they’re all justified in their own ways. Obviously, seasoned fans will be able to pick up when a song is not from King Gizzard, especially when it appears on a platform they’re actively boycotting, but that same luxury is not experienced by new fans. The numbers around people detecting AI music are concerning. A recent Deezer/Ispos study showed that 97% of people can’t tell the difference between real and AI music. If the last few months have shown us anything it’s that this problem isn’t going away. It will persist, and it’s going to be a nightmare for both fans and musicians. It’s become more and more clear that people should learn how to detect AI in a number of mediums (you can watch Mic the Snare’s guide on AI music for a start).

However, while the AI aspect of these accounts is concerning in its own right, let’s not lose sight of the underlying structural issues which allow these uploads to proliferate. Whether it's AI or not ultimately isn’t the issue. The issue is that these uploads are allowed to even go up without verification. It is mind boggling that the guardrails preventing these types of uploads, as well as the tools to combat them, are virtually nonexistent. It is frustrating that it took a whole month for Spotify to go after King Lizard Wizard, and even then you could argue they only did it when they were catching flak for not taking care of it. And again, we still have no actual evidence as to how Spotify was picking up obviously fake tracks and putting them out as the official sources. If Instagram allowed someone else to post to your account without a password, or even put someone else’s posts on your account because they look vaguely like you, it would be seen as a massive breach of privacy and a means for exploitation and impersonation. With streaming, it is sadly the norm. While creating the protections for these types of uploads won’t end AI music, they would be vital tools for artists to combat abuse. The foundation of how tracks are uploaded is antiquated, and unless streaming and distribution services start changing the rules, we’ll probably see more and more impersonators squeaking past detection.