Terell coincidentally released an album in the US on the exact same day as the real TTD released his debut album. Most of the tracks are the same as TTD’s album, apart from those three Michael Jackson tracks.
Errr.. what? Yep, track length matches. Some order shuffles. Edit notes say “Taken from iTunes.” but then adds it as a 1987 CD.
Odd I thought. Must do something about that. I’ll contact the editor.
Then I looked at what else the editor has been adding.
Interesting… every edit is “Taken from iTunes.” Yet I cannot find any of these artists on Discogs or Google searches.
Don’t have an iTunes account to check… but I feel I ain’t going to find much different there.
So - anyone else recognise any of these artists? Do we have an editor who is making up releases?
I have gone hunting elsewhere. Pretty random, but Discogs don’t have these artists. Catalogue numbers fail lookups. I widened the search to Google and only other references are coming up on sites who are sucking data from MusicBrainz.
I am searching random releases of this editor, but just failing to find anything in the RealWorld™
tl;dr
Is it just me, or is there a large made up world here? Anyone got any of these releases? Or able to find anything that backs them up? Anyone recognise the faces on the artwork?
And the editor who added that never added anything else…
My challenge to anyone reading this thread: find any release added by that editor that exists. Beware not to be fooled by places like setlist.fm who use MB data.
People like Mia Aguilera have a Genius page but I can’t find her on Spotify.
Oh… what a surprise… the editor who added Mia to Genius.com seems to also have heard of more of our mystery artists like Kiyani Nöel and Paris Fendi… https://genius.com/monafenty
EDIT: messed up quoting, but this is in reply to the Mia Aguilera discogs release
The back cover has possibly a bar code number: 389439842020, becomes a valid GTIN as 3894398420208, no hits. There’s also the discogs catalog number 72527273070, which shows up for this unrelated release in MB Release “TRIMEN” by Youri Thunda - MusicBrainz. That one would be a valid bar code as 725272730706. Searching for that one shows a couple of odd results, e.g. as barcode generator examples.
seems that way. maybe they just wanted to brag about their pretty good album art spoofing abilities by adding them all to MB? maybe this is their odd way of making bootleg compilations?
What I noticed when looking at Genius.com is they seem to have started over there in 2023 with their fake lyrics.
Something we will never know answers to I guess.
So we are going to just delete this stuff? @sound.and.vision - I notice you seem to have made a start on deleting the releases. Have you already hit all of them? I was going to give it more than 24 hours to give chance of more feedback.
Look the open vote will take a few days to clear, so I’m not expecting everyone to dogpile yet, but some of these aren’t even very creative. Some of them (like this one - Gavin Martin - MusicBrainz) are obvious as to whom they’re trying to impersonate.
I expect the more you follow the fakes, the deeper the rabbit hole will go. When I hit the Genius.com batch it stood out due to the same collection of artists as at MB. I assume this is the same case with last.fm - they only edit their fake artists.
Get enough of the cross links into place and they will become real due to being able to point to them on the internet. It is when someone like this creates the Spotify channel to go with their output it will become scary!
I can see someone doing this as a AI project. An experiment in what it takes to fake it into realism. I assume those other sites are like MB in the fact no one notices these creations appear as no one is “subscribed” to these edits.
The fake plays are easy as many of these albums are made up of real tracks from other artists.
But fake plays now point to either bots playing tunes, which takes time. Or someone knowing how to game that algorithm.
Mainly based on the AcoustIDs. And if you see linked AcoustIDs they need to be unlinked or the recordings will not disappear. (Pretty sure I unlinked them all now…)
I am the rest of the releases myself now. Got into the swing of things with the old flame thrower…
I was just about to look into creating this ( I’ve written programs for editing data in the past but I’ve never had a reason to write a program to do delete-release edits before) but it seems you’ve already done the edits.
Once you realise the key is deleting the Releases, it is only a hundred or so clicks… easy to get in the flow. Remembering to unlink their acoustIDs should mean the Recordings self destruct due to no links.
Interesting to see how often they had linked some AcoustID to real recordings. Albums in shuffled orders. This may be to fake the last.fm data mentioned above. It was also strange looking at some edit history where they didn’t seem to make up their mind as to which tracks were going to be on the release, or changing labels around. Even if this was a bot, there was a lot of hand tweaking.
I am surprised they were not spotted by the grammar editors. Lots of non-compliant capitals. And feat’s in the wrong place. It was only a matter of time before this was spotted.
