Some Asshats on Spotify Are Stealing a Young Musician’s Work
It’s every creative’s worst nightmare — you pour yourself into your art and take it to the internet with the hopes of building a career off your talents, only to see someone steal your hard work and profit off of it. It happens far too often on platforms like Spotify and for Flat Black vocalist Wrex Horton, that nightmare has become his reality.
In a video he posted recently to his YouTube page, Horton explained that for a while now, he’s been dealing with a situation where all of the music he’s ever put up on Spotify has been targeted by opportunistic motherfuckers on the platform. According to him, someone’s taking songs from his various projects like Flat Black and The Worst of Us and uploading it to their own artist page. It’s apparently even gone so far as having songs from the band he played in as a teenager getting swiped.
“It’s the age of content ID and rising copyright infringement laws and enforcement, so my only question was ‘how the hell did this happen?!’”
That’s a great question. As we’ve reported in the past, Spotify gets insane amounts of music uploaded to its servers every day, so it’s easy to imagine a scenario where this sort of thing just falls through the cracks.
We won’t share the artist name that the apparent thieves are using, but you can find that in the video below. According to Horton, that artist is straight up ripping off whole tracks and either changing the titles or being brazen enough to keep the original track names intact. In one instance, a track on the thief’s page got over 100,000 listens — which should have gone to The Worst of Us.
“The bigger issue is how many other people are doing this to me and other smaller, struggling creators making quality music while struggling to stay afloat. How often does this fly under the radar and affect anyone trying to make their way in this industry in an honest and true way?”
Horton really goes over what he’s learned about this whole scam and how it’s affecting other artists. Rather than steal his thunder (and views), I urge you to check out his video to learn more. It’s really a fucked up situation that Spotify should address yesterday.
