Not Even Anthrax is Safe from Spotify’s A.I. Slop Problem

If you’re one of Anthrax‘s 1.1 million monthly listeners over on Spotify, you may have gotten a notification or maybe you noticed on their artist page that a new album suddenly dropped out of nowhere. No fan fare. No hype machine. Just A.I. generated cover art and seven new tracks behind a weird as fuck title — Crazy Sheep.

As long as you’ve not been living under a rock for the last couple years, you should immediately know what the fuck this is. It’s A.I. bullshit. It’s a fake album made by some artist or unscrupulous record label that’s trying to generate as much money as it can on the digital streaming platform. This isn’t a new phenomenon and has affected artists of varying popularity, ranging from your fledgling ambient electronica solo act to incredibly popular metalcore acts.

In the case of Anthrax and this phantom Crazy Sheep release, it’s listed as a collaboration between the noted legendary thrash metal band and some unknown creator with 273 monthly listeners called “El Director”. One look on their page shows that their output is nothing but A.I. generated electronic music.

And while A.I. generated music on its own is a major fucking problem for the platform (and for humanity in general, I’d posit), it can be a major problem for the artists that someone like “El Director” latches onto. In almost every case, these “albums” are generated by some opportunistic asshole trying to siphon listens from a major artist. That not only keeps money out of the hands of actual artists trying to make a living, but it could cause Spotify to flag and remove an artist’s page from the platform altogether for uploading A.I. slop that they didn’t even have any hand in making.

In the case of this Anthrax “release”, it’s laughable because most fans of the thrash metal band are savvy enough to know this isn’t real. None of those tracks have gotten the kind of push you’d expect from metal medai outlets like this one, nor has the band been blowing anything up about new music on their socials. Well, other than the fact that they’re hard at work on their followup to 2018’s For All Kings. Those facts should immediately throw up some red flags.

Though Spotify has a policy on the books against “Deceptive Content”, it’s unclear exactly how the platform actually tries to handle the situation. Squillions upon squillions of new songs are uploaded to the platform every day, with a good amount of that being generative bullshit. In many cases, Spotify either takes way too long to address this sort of situation or it doesn’t even get involved at all, opting to let the artists and their management take care of the problem themselves.

In recent months, artists like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, indie rock band Deerhoof, and other artists have pulled their discographies from the streaming platform, but in most of those cases, it’s due to the fact that CEO Daniel Ek is actively investing in A.I. miltary tech with his earnings.

This is just further proof that the world needs stricter A.I. regulatory measures. Because eventually, the artistic expression we as humans crave so much will be replaced by A.I. generated diarrhea, which is something none of us want.

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