Have you ever heard a catchy tune playing in the background of your favorite streaming platform, and wondered why it seems so familiar, yet you can’t quite recall its name or who the artist is? If so, it seems that you may have stumbled upon the mysterious case of the Spotify song with 49 different names and the AI-generated music behind it.
Recently, Drake, The Weeknd, Beyonce, and Rihanna have all been involved in the phenomenon surrounding how AI-generated songs are taking over conversations in the music industry. Spotify user Adam Faze noticed that a 53 second track with classical instruments was recommended to him constantly on the streaming platform. After clicking on the song and seeing that the title and artist were different each time, he compiled all the songs onto a playlist, which ended up having 49 different songs. To Faze’s surprise, he found all the songs featured the exact same audio.
This prompted Faze to share his unearthing on Twitter, where the thread became viral, with other users finding similar tracks. Looking further into this anomaly, the songs were all linked to a label called Sky Tech Distribution, and all were uploaded since June of 2022. Further inspection found that this label had almost two thousand albums all presumably created by an AI. This could explain how all the tracks came to be online as, theoretically, AI could recreate any song from the history of recorded music.
This controversial situation has sparked debate about the value and presence of AI-generated music, concluding that listeners may potentially be tricked into listening to them and giving them undeserving streams. In response to this and other AI-generated music on their platforms, Universal Music Group recently issued an official request to Spotify and Apple Music to block AI services from being able to access their catalogues of copyrighted music.
Despite all of this, the mystery of where this one main track with all its forty-nine variations continues. There has yet to be a response from Sky Tech Distribution, and Spotify has not clarified its stance on AI-generated songs appearing on its platform. As the use of AI grows and its abilities become more advanced, it seems the controversy of AI-generated music is here to stay.
For the company behind this AI-generated music, Sky Tech Distribution has some 1,944 albums lying in its wings, with corresponding cover art. It is said to be a USA-based music distribution company, and as of yet has not released a statement regarding this issue.
Adam Faze is the Spotify user who jumped on this curious case of the same exact song re-surfacing in 49 different titles, and shared his findings on Twitter, which soon went viral. Upon his own inspection, Faze realized that the song was nothing short of AI-generated, deeming it too generic for a human to have created. Faze claims that the goal of his Twitter thread is to shed awareness on the situation and keep people from being duped into listening to AI-generated music.
