Anthrax Becomes the Latest Victim of ‘AI Slop’ on Streaming

Anthrax has become the latest “AI slop” victim thanks to an EDM album that arrived on Spotify and other DSPs under its name.

Ticked-off superfans promptly lambasted the unauthorized release in social posts, and metal mags rather unsurprisingly took aim at the machine-made audio from there. However, one needn’t be an Anthrax diehard to pick up on the stylistic departure from the act’s genuine projects.

Still live on YouTube (albeit not as part of Anthrax’s account) but not Spotify, the electronic effort in question, Crazy Sheep, is certainly true to its title. In the titular track, that sheep’s baa calls out reliably across nearly six minutes of painful listening, which actually marks a departure from the generic minute-long AI uploads of old.

And as many know, there’s more to those uploads’ changes than longer durations and relative quality improvements.

For now – and with Spotify willing to pause new releases on AI “artist” profiles benefiting from too much momentum for comfort – the playbook appears to revolve around putting fake songs on real acts’ pages, scoring pre-takedown streams, and repeating.

Of course, the most readily available solution is banning AI audio altogether – or, at a minimum, tagging the relevant media accordingly before isolating it from proper music made by professionals.

But to state the obvious, this outcome isn’t yet a reality; Deezer is seemingly alone in leading the AI-tagging charge. As such, the focus naturally shifts to who exactly is pocketing royalties with artificial intelligence works plastered on actual artists’ pages.

At least when it comes to Crazy Sheep, we needn’t look far to find a top-level answer. On YouTube, the uploads are attributed to a “label” called Diablo Music (World Wild Waves), which itself has a lengthy credits page on AI music generator Muso.

Several things jump out here. Most immediately, Diablo/World Wild has been “making” a ton of AI audio for a while. Next, the entities haven’t exclusively targeted Anthrax with fake music; works falsely attributed to deceased pianist Eddie Palmieri and others have apparently been streaming for months.

Building on that point, the AI-track issue isn’t solely affecting Spotify. (Nevertheless, the presence of bootleg songs on big-name artist profiles raises more questions yet. A key one: If the service can’t stop the problem in its tracks, is encouraging billions of user comments and messages a good idea from a moderation perspective?)

To be sure, Apple Music and YouTube are also displaying the fake Diablo/World Wild Palmieri album, A Contraluz. And the mess doesn’t end there, either.

Just scratching the surface here, the fake album, attached to a distinct profile on Spotify, has multiple “artist” features, and the pages are racking up streams as well. Plus, both Crazy Sheep and A Contraluz were provided to YouTube by self-billed “full-service YouTube Agency and multi-channel network” Age Media, the descriptions show.

DMN reached out to Amsterdam-based Age Media for comment but didn’t immediately receive a response.