King Gizzard Pulled Their Music From Spotify in Protest, and Now Spotify Is Hosting AI Knockoffs of Their Songs

Acclaimed Australian prog rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard joined a growing number of artists when it left Spotify in July.

At the time, band leader Stu Mackenzie took aim at Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, excoriating him for investing in an AI weapons company.

“We’ve been saying f*** Spotify for years,” Mackenzie told the Los Angeles Times. “In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented.”

But in a technological twist, impersonators are now using generative AI to clone the band’s iconic sound. A user on Reddit was recently recommended a track on his Release Radar that was a clear knockoff of the real King Gizzard, alerting them to the scheme.

The track spotted by the Reddit user, called “Rattlesnake,” is listed under an artist with the incredibly similar name “King Lizard Wizard” — which is striking, because the real King Gizzard also has a song called “Rattlesnake.” The similarities don’t end there: the fake version of the song, which is clearly AI-generated, has identical lyrics to King Gizzard’s original version, along with a notably similar composition.

In fact, every song uploaded by the knockoff “King Lizard” artist on Spotify has the same title as an actual King Gizzard song, with its corresponding lyrics ripped straight from the source, suggesting the perpetrator fed the lyrics into an AI music generator and instructed it to copy the band’s sound. A quick search for “King Gizzard” on the platform brings up the band’s abandoned official profile, with “King Lizard Wizard” being recommended immediately below it.

The fact that Spotify has let the knockoff band proliferate on its platform — where it’s accumulated tens of thousands of streams since uploading the tracks last month — is especially egregious because King Gizzard has already been targeted by impersonators on its service. As Platfomer reported last month, Spotify was previously overrun by another King Gizzard impersonator that uploaded “muzak” versions of the band’s songs.

In other words, if there’s one band that Spotify should be manually monitoring for AI rip-offs, it’s King Gizzard, but it’s clearly making no such effort. Spotify didn’t reply to a request for comment.

The fake band’s album art also appears to be AI-generated, and has been live on Spotify for weeks. Adding insult to injury, some of the fake tracks even list Mackenzie as the “composer” and “lyricist.”

A quick search for “King Gizzard” on the platform brings up the band’s abandoned official profile, with “King Lizard Wizard” being recommended immediately below it. The top song result for the search is the AI band’s ripped off version of “Rattlesnake.”

Unsurprisingly, the unsavory attempt at cashing in on a band that pointedly departed Spotify didn’t sit well with many fans.

“A bad AI ripoff, from aesthetics to band name, copying their songs,” wrote the Reddit user who discovered the track on their Spotify account. “I find this absolutely deplorable and am now quitting my account.”

The incident highlights how Spotify is seriously struggling with content moderation in an age increasingly being defined by a barrage of AI slop.

The company announced new policies to protect artists against “spam, impersonation, and deception” in September. But given the AI imitations that are still invading Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists, which the company prominently recommends to its users, it’s clear that the company is struggling to meaningfully address the issue.

We’ve come across previous egregious examples, like a dubious track that claimed to be performed by Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon’s 2000s side project Volcano Choir — but in reality was AI slop.

While Spotify has said it will be cracking down on spam and impersonation, AI-generated music is technically allowed on the platform — some of which has even turned out to be a major hit, with an AI country song even topping a digital Billboard chart.

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