Acclaimed Australian prog rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard made headlines earlier this year when it quit Spotify, protesting the platform’s CEO, Daniel Ek, who heavily invested in an AI weapons company.
The band was one of several music acts to pull their music from Spotify over ethical concerns. Many of them have taken issue with artists earning very little money per stream on the platform, or the company donating a sizable sum to president Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony.
Next, something extremely dark happened: an impostor created a band on Spotify with the extremely similar band name of “King Lizard Wizard” and used AI to generate songs with the same titles as actual King Gizzard songs that ripped off their entire lyrics and sound, accumulating tens of thousands of streams while remaining on the streaming service for weeks without detection.
Outspoken King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard frontman Stu Mackenzie has now excoriated the platform after finding out about the ruse.
“[I’m] trying to see the irony in this situation,” he said in a statement quoted by The Music. “But seriously wtf we are truly doomed.”
Spotify has since pulled down the offending material, with a spokesperson telling Futurism in a statement that it “strictly prohibits any form of artist impersonation.”
“The content in question was removed for violating our platform policies, and no royalties were paid out for any streams generated,” the spokesperson added.
But the company’s reactive cat-and-mouse game isn’t exactly assuring artists, given Mackenzie’s reaction.
The incident highlights how Spotify is seriously struggling to keep AI slop at bay on its platform. While the company announced new policies to protect artists against “spam, impersonation, and deception” in September, we continue to see offending AI impersonations landing in users’ Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists, which the company prominently recommends to them.
Worse yet, as Platfomer reported last month, a separate King Gizzard impersonator had previously attempted to cash in on the band’s royalties using AI — meaning that if there was one band that Spotify should have been manually screening for impostors, it should have been King Gizzard.
In short, Spotify has a major PR headache to clean up as it reels from an onslaught of AI slop.
And a growing number of artists, including King Gizzard, have finally had enough and are looking for greener pastures. Who could blame them?
More on the incident: King Gizzard Pulled Their Music From Spotify in Protest, and Now Spotify Is Hosting AI Knockoffs of Their Songs
The post King Gizzard Responds to Being Impersonated by AI on Spotify: “We Are Truly Doomed” appeared first on Futurism.
