Behind the Blog: Eating the Internet
404 Media Samantha Cole
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
AI-made songs are showing up on Spotify under real artists’ names. The weird part is how easy it is to find, once someone starts looking.
Based on reporting by 404 Media, Samantha Cole — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
404 Media’s Emanuel says one lesson keeps coming back: when a story is hard, just do it. That sounds almost too simple, but it’s also the point. Reporting can stall when the scope feels fuzzy or the abuse looks too broad to pin down. Then you actually start checking, and the mess gets a lot clearer.
That’s what happened here with AI-generated music on Spotify appearing under the names of real artists. Emanuel spent a couple of weeks digging into it, building on a problem that 404 Media and others have covered before. The striking part wasn’t that the issue exists. It was how widespread it seemed once he started looking.
He says that if you talk to musicians, or just click around music platforms for a while, you can quickly run into hundreds of examples. That is the ugly part of platform abuse: it can feel abstract right up until someone bothers to count, or at least to look long enough to stop pretending it’s rare.
This is also a reminder that some of the best reporting starts with stubbornness, not brilliance. The story was already there. The work was in refusing to let it stay vague.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The internet keeps rewarding people who treat abuse like a reporting inconvenience instead of a product failure. Platforms love to act surprised when the same junk shows up again and again, as if nobody pressed the obvious buttons. Real artists shouldn’t need a scavenger hunt to find their own names attached to machine slop.
Read more about this at: 404 Media