Longtime fans of Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon will recall Volcano Choir, an acclaimed side project he spearheaded in the 2000s and early 2010s that hasn’t released an album since 2013’s “Repave.”
Suddenly interrupting that long dormancy is a new single titled “Silkymoon Light,” which appeared on Volcano Choir’s Spotify page this week with no fanfare from the band or its label.
The only issue? The track bears all of the hallmarks of cheaply-produced AI slop, featuring no intro and diving straight into a cheesy and forgettable country-inflected ballad. It features a robotic-sounding voice with only a distant resemblance to Vernon’s distinctive vocals.
“Our love will always find a way,” the voice sings in the track, in an almost mockingly poor imitation of Vernon’s musical caliber.
The album art also looks suspiciously AI-generated, featuring a Moon with a smaller Moon in the background, as well as the overall shellacked look characteristic of AI slop.
Volcano Choir’s most recent album, titled “Repave,” was released in September 2013 and the group has been on hiatus since the end of its last tour in November 2014. Bon Iver and Vernon have remained in the public view with a series of widely-praised releases and collaborations with artists including Taylor Swift and Travis Scott.
Ironically, the news comes just days after Spotify officially admitted it was being overrun by AI “slop.” The platform announced new policies to protect artists against “spam, impersonation, and deception.”
The company also made headlines earlier this year after a self-proclaimed “indie rock band” called The Velvet Sundown racked up millions of streams, which later turned out to be an entirely AI-generated “hoax.”
“At its worst, AI can be used by bad actors and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, push ‘slop’ into the ecosystem, and interfere with authentic artists working to build their careers,” the company wrote in a press release this week. “That kind of harmful AI content degrades the user experience for listeners and often attempts to divert royalties to bad actors.”
To combat AI slop, the company said it’s looking to roll out a new spam filter that can detect common tactics used by spammers to game Spotify’s royalties system.
But judging by Volcano Choir’s latest “release,” the company is still struggling to combat a deluge of AI trickery: beyond the fact that whoever’s behind the track managed to get it featured on Volcano Choir’s official artist profile, there’s no indication that it was produced using AI.
Spotify isn’t the only platform to be duped, though. The single also currently features on Volcano Choir’s profile on Tidal and Deezer — though not Apple Music, interestingly.
After we reached out to Spotify with questions about the suspicious single, the company removed the track from Volcano Choir’s page.
“We’re aware of this issue and have removed the content,” a Spotify spokesperson told us in a statement. “That change should be reflected on the platform soon. Across the music industry, AI is accelerating many of the problems that already exist — e.g. spam, fraud, and deceptive content — which is why we recently announced new policies aimed at making Spotify a more transparent, fair, and trustworthy platform for artists and listeners.”
“Because music flows through a complex supply chain of labels and distributors, bad actors can sometimes exploit gaps in the system to push incorrect content onto artist profiles,” the statement continued. “We’re testing new prevention tactics with leading artist distributors to equip them to better stop these attacks at the source, and investing more resources into our content mismatch process, reducing the wait time for review, and enabling artists to report ‘mismatch’ even in the pre-release state.”
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