Stolen albums? (bizarre rabbit hole)
Hi. Let me tell you about something very strange me and a couple friends have discovered.
Starting in probably May-June, I have found several nu metal albums on Spotify, that when you listen to the songs, they just sound like your typical 2000s nu metal. But what is strange is that all of these albums have something in common: they do not look nu metal AT ALL- the artist name is always some generic name of a person, the cover art is always modern and corporate looking (not nu metal looking), or at least very like Jazz or Opera looking. The album name is always something generic and super not nu metal (eg. Time of Peace). And they are all new- from early-late 2023 (at least the ones I have seen).
Additionally, all of the songs on these stolen albums have almost certainly botted streams. Every song on both albums have basically the same amounts of plays. as shown in the image below (apologies for how big they are):
Christina Davis - Time of Peace
The stolen releases seem to be slightly pitched down (and maybe ever-so-slightly slowed?) as well, possibly to avoid copyright detection. And if one of these releases does get removed, they are re-distributed under a different random artist name with a random album name. For example, Chapman Rusk - Home of Cindy was taken down, so it was put right back up under this page: Merlin Partridge - Blaspheme
If you look at the last.fm pages for these releases, they always have next to no plays and all of the albums in the Similar Albums section are just identical- some generic modern non-numetal looking slop under some random person's name.
If you can, please help identify the actual bands responsible for these releases, as only one of them has been identified. Here are a few examples of these stolen albums listed below:
Christina Davis - Time of Peace (which is actually Sordid - Demure)
as mentioned above, Chapman Rusk - Home of Cindy (the actual band behind this has not yet been identified)
Merlin Partridge - Blaspheme (this is the new release for Chapman Rusk - Home of Cindy)
Oswald Dodd - On The Way (the actual band behind this has not yet been identified either)
Note: all of these stolen albums were seemingly distributed through SongCast, Inc.
I don't know why whoever is doing this chose to steal nu metal specifically, or maybe they are stealing music of other genres as well, it is all confusing and messed up.