GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He has over 18 years of experience, including 10 years as managing editor at Engadget.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Spotify is beta-testing a new feature called Artist Profile Protection that lets artists review releases before they go live. Sometimes songs end up on the wrong artist pages because of metadata mixups or shared names. But increasingly, artists have been targeted by impostors and AI-generated fakes. Profile Protection offers a buffer against bad actors.
Everyone from Drake and Beyonce, to experimental composers like William Basinski, and indie rock acts like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have had fake tracks appear under their names on streaming platforms, with some that were likely AI-generated. It’s an issue that has stoked a lot of anger among artists, with King Gizzard frontman Stu Mackenzie saying, “we are truly doomed,” and Basinski calling it “total bullshit.”
Artists who are included in the beta will still have to opt in. From then on, any music will need to be approved before it will be displayed on that profile, either by the artist themselves or their team. The review process adds an extra step to releasing songs on Spotify.
While it’s certainly a welcome added level of protection, if every streaming service required you to approve every release manually, it could become a serious problem for independent artists and small labels with limited resources. So Spotify is also issuing artist keys to beta participants. This is a unique code that, when included with the music, triggers an automatic approval.
Right now, Spotify is calling the feature a “limited beta,” but says that it will roll it out to “all artists as soon as we possibly can.”