To Brad and Jason, it felt like Spotify was dragging its feet. All told, that ended up taking two weeks.
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Spotify told them they can’t take down someone else’s music without “just cause,” and when asked if they could at least take the song off the main TV Girl page, they said they were working on it. Apparently, because they don’t own a copyright on the name “TV Girl,” technically anyone can upload a TV Girl song. When Brad and Jason, who aren’t on a label, contacted Spotify directly to try to resolve the issue, they got caught up in a lot of red tape. Perhaps most notably included was Her’s, a British duo whose quick rise to fame was abruptly stopped short last year after both members died in a car crash.īig indie rock names including Foxygen are among the affected. Searching through online music forums, they managed to find 11 other artists who’d unwittingly uploaded EDM tracks to their Spotify pages, all on either June 25th or 26th, all with the same oversaturated, flowery-aesthetic cover art.Īmong those targeted were some big names in the indie rock scene: Foxygen, Frankie Cosmos, Pond, and Crumb were all victims. Rather, it was a part of an industry-wide hijacking - one that had targeted at least a dozen artists that week alone. The rogue single was far from an isolated incident. It wasn’t until Brad and Jason looked around online that they realized they were a part of something much bigger. Had someone hacked their account to troll them? Was a scammer making money by impersonating their band? And if that was the case, why a mid-sized band like TV Girl? Why not Billie Eilish, or Post Malone? The new single stuck out like a sore thumb amid TV Girl's hypnotic bedroom pop. Like the cover art, it felt stock - less like an actual song and more like background music for a YouTube ad. Instead of the hypnotic bedroom pop the band built its following on, this was generic, sanitized EDM. It was obvious, at least to them, that this wasn’t a TV Girl song.
They hadn’t greenlit a new single, and the cover art, a hi-res stock photo of two hands clasping, was a far cry from their usual two-tone, film-grain aesthetic.īaffled, they listened to it and even more red flags went up. Right away, Brad and Jason were confused. It also appeared in the “Release Radar” - an auto-generated playlist that populates with new releases from artists in your library - of their over 1 million monthly listeners. The song, which had been posted that morning, had triggered a notification for each of their 119,000 Spotify followers, urging them to check it out. On June 26th, Brad Petering and Jason Wyman of the popular indie band TV Girl checked their Spotify artist page and found that they’d uploaded a new single.