So I was trawling Discogs searching for obscure Irish electronica. I found a release called ‘Lithic’ by Herv. Looks interesting. I search these terms on the wider web to see if there’s a way I can listen. There’s a Bandcamp result, but it looks like this:
Strange right? No digital or physical release. Instead there’s a link to a scammy-looking usenet service. Is someone scraping a music database (maybe Discogs) to create fake Bandcamp pages (probably with AI) as a scam? And if so, why choose this fairly unheard-of release? A search of the real Bandcamp turns up no such release page. The text has the chipper, ingratiating tone of AI. If you follow the links to ‘similar albums’, you find more scam release pages with music from every conceivable era and genre, all with the same cloying tone in the text.
it’s spam fosho and if you follow the links in the description to other “albums” you get into more of the same spam, someone has a bot uploading this crap, I’ve reported a couple and suggest some others to report as well
Nice. I sent an email to Bandcamp support but reporting looks like a good option. Is it actually being hosted by Bandcamp then? Rather than a clone? Maybe they found a way to trick the release creation form. I would have thought normally you we need to upload a release to create the page.
they might just add an empty wave of something to trick the form, or maybe just make a “pre-release” without tracks by just adding the spam text that fits the formatting rules.
I can confirm that this is new sort of plague, weirdly targeted at collectors? Not sure what’s the point.
A lot of missing release of experimental music has such AI-generated page, almost every second record I’m looking for. Bandcamp folks seem not to be aware about the scale
Thanks for confirming! I have also seen so, so many over the past few months, and reported them. I also can’t really see the point of the scam. Seems to just be an annoyance for a very niche sort of music explorer. I don’t understand how Bandcamp can’t stop them being created at source. Don’t they have a mechanism for verifying the uploader is human?
I lost other examples, but most of the time it’s out of print albums, even if the authors are active and have the other albums published (both examples)
The scam seems to be getting people to follow the off-bandcamp link and enter credit card details to ostensibly download more music. The way AI writes those music descriptions makes my skin crawl…
Neither of these resemble the scam pages we’ve been highlighting. The scam pages don’t have any music embedded on them at all. Maybe these are the same album uploaded twice by two different stakeholders in the project?
Potentially a different type of scam for sure.
Or perhaps your scenario is the case.
I have also encountered various sites on Bandcamp where one can buy the same FAX (Pete Namlook’s old label) releases. Those seem to have varying degrees of legitimacy as well.
I’m just baffled that people keep on trying to abuse music/musicians in any way possible.
I mean there’s not a lot of money in the music business(unless you’re in a “super star” league) these days, especially recording and releasing music is hard to get a decent income out of.
But the creativity in uploading fake music, AI bands, other people’s music to gain income is just outrageous.
Now even on freaking BandCamp!
Don’t get me started on the whole streaming service industry, I could talk about that for days.
Sorry for the rant, I’ll see my self out…
Love you all, be creative and don’t let these mother fuckers bring you down
