Last week a song called Foren way appeared on the Arcturus profile. Spotify pushed it into my release radar. The auto-generated YouTube channel carried it too. First new music in a decade from one of Norway’s strangest bands, right when their real comeback album sits finished at the label. I published a piece about it the same day.
It was not Arcturus. A reader heard a cheap electronic loop where I had reported avant-garde metal, mailed me, and was right. The article came down the same evening. This piece is the honest receipt, because what happened to me is happening everywhere, and the mechanics deserve more attention than my embarrassment.
Here is the scam, as documented by 404 Media and Engadget last month. You generate a track with an AI tool. You make cover art the same way. You sign up with a digital distributor, claim to be an existing band, and upload. Neither the distributor nor the platform checks. The track lands on the real band’s profile across Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon, the platform recommends it to the band’s followers, and the royalties flow to you. One researcher has tracked over three hundred of these, posing as everyone from major pop acts to dead jazz musicians. Roughly fifty thousand AI-generated songs reportedly hit Spotify every day. Spotify’s own statement says the quiet part plainly: profiles that are not actively managed are especially vulnerable.
Read that again. The scam specifically targets dormant bands. The Arcturus situation is the template: a legend silent since 2015, an audience primed for a comeback, nobody at the wheel of the profile. The fake lands exactly where the longing is. And the damage is not just royalties. Imagine a casual listener hearing that loop and concluding the band lost it, weeks before the real record arrives. We have covered AI fakery before, but a deepfake video flatters its subject compared to this. This one quietly spends a band’s trust.
What actually works? Not the algorithm, that much I can confirm from experience. The reader who caught my mistake did it the old way: he pressed play and listened. So: trust ears over feeds. Report fake releases through the platform menus. Follow bands through channels they control, not profiles nobody guards. And when the real Mið of this world comes out, buy the record. Scammers cannot fake a gatefold.
The corrected version of my Arcturus coverage will exist the day Prophecy Productions announces that album properly. Until then the lesson stays pinned above my desk: when a dormant legend suddenly releases something and no label, no press and no band channel says a word, the silence is the story.
Listen to this (the real thing): La Masquerade Infernale
