Scammers in the Stream

No, we're not having a baby.

They could have at least tried to make it look a little more on-brand.

Last month, out of nowhere, a new song appeared on our Spotify page. We didn’t put it there, and we had no idea who did. The cover artwork was an AI-generated image of an empty crib in an oatmeal-colored room. The song was called “Nursery.”

Before long “Nursery” was on Apple Music, YouTube Music, and every other streamer. As it spread, we started getting messages from friends, fans, and family. Was this our weird, mid-concept way of announcing a pregnancy? Were we okay?

We asked each platform, individually, to take it down, but “Nursery” has lingered. Maddeningly, it’s still an “official release” on our YouTube Channel, which is where we learned—from a caption that we, again, did not write—that the song was composed by someone in Russia named Nikita Shmatkov, who is published by “Label Control” publishing, a company which, as far as we can tell, doesn’t exist.

Nikita Shmatkov is a mystery too. All our Googling has turned up is a year-old Reddit thread from fans of the band Failure spinning out because a mystery composition had landed on Failure’s Spotify. It was, of course, a Nikita Shmatkov joint.

What could Nikita Shmatkov possibly gain from posing as YACHT, or Failure? Is it an honest mistake, a backend bug causing as much grief for an electronic musician in Russia as it is for this post-pop group in Los Angeles? Or has Nikita Shmatkov figured out he can squeeze out some streaming profits by pinning tracks to our page, which is perhaps not as closely guarded as a major label artist’s? Either way, this kind of streaming mix-up is enough of a thing that Spotify has a whole Support page for it. Our digital distributor offers something called “Page Defender Ultimate” to guard against it, for $89 a year. Is the call coming from inside the house?

The fact that we can’t protect our own (reasonably) good name from spam without paying extra fees does not bode well for the future of music. We agonize over every single thing we release, and these platforms are, for better or worse, our largest gateway to the world. But when any rando can upload a song through a digital distribution platform and call it YACHT, what’s the point? It feels like a microcosm of much larger forces at play in the world eroding truth, attribution, and authenticity.

Anyway, it gets worse. Cut to last Saturday. We were driving home from a party when we got a DM from our longtime fan and friend, Mitchell Davis. He was super excited about the new album and wanted to compliment us on the cover design. The new album? we responded. You mean the one we haven’t even announced yet? The one that doesn’t come out until the end of August? Yeah, that one.

Without our knowing it, our digital distributor had sent the new record to Apple Music two months early. Disaster. We immediately wrote to our distributor’s Support, a chatbot, which told us someone would get back to us in 7-10 days. Disaster! Apple Music wouldn’t remove the album from our page without a notice from our distributor. We were stuck in a loop. We’d invested a lot of our money into this new album, which will be our first completely independent physical release—recording it, mastering it, making beautiful LPs and cassettes.

We had a whole plan! And now it was just…out?

Numbers vary on how many songs are uploaded to streaming platforms every day. It might be 60,000; it might be 120,000. Either way, that’s at least two months of music every day. We make about ten songs every two or three years. We hate that we have to go through opaque, mostly automated platforms for those songs to reach listeners—especially now that we’re in our self-releasing era and have to manage all the little (and big) logistics ourselves.

We’re doing our best, but it’s not intuitive. We spun out for five days, sending increasingly deranged messages to Apple Music, but we’re pretty sure we were just yelling at another chatbot. It feels nuts to completely own your music and still have so little control over how, where, and in this case when it streams! Do you ever get that feeling, when you’re driving through a particularly bleak suburb or strip mall, where you’re like, “we live on a wild and beautiful blue planet, we could have done anything here, and we chose this?”

That’s sort of how it feels to navigate these platforms—especially since, when there’s a problem, they all just pass the buck to each other. In desperation, we had to delete the entire album and start over, which could potentially vaporize our chances of getting the new songs on any important playlists. But it wasn’t all bad. We got some nice messages from people who loved the album and couldn’t figure out why we weren’t promoting it. And we got some advance intel on what songs were the most popular. Is that marketing? Let’s call it a wash.

Here Goes Something!

If you were one of the people who caught our new record during its weird digital Rumspringa, hope you enjoyed it! It’s going back into the womb now—but since you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you’ll be the first to know when it actually comes out. We have so much planned, all of it completely experimental.

And a big hello to our new readers! Thanks for heeding our “call to action” and joining this adventure with us. We’re deeply appreciative of your eyes and ears. Next week the real album promo begins in earnest, so watch your inbox for announcements, sneak peeks, and other fun nonsense. We will try so hard not to be annoying and to be as transparent about the process as possible!

Also, please follow us on Spotify and favorite us on (lol) Apple Music, so that the new record shows up in your feed on the appointed delivery date!

Let’s see what happens?

Love,
Claire, Jona, and Rob

PS. If you’re new here, or if it’s been a minute since you devoted precious brain cells to our band, here are a few things you might want to know about: The Computer Accent, a documentary about our early experiments in machine learning, is available to stream on Apple TV and Prime Video. Claire invented Bumper Stickers for Your Phone and has been publishing cool long-form articles about things like lucid dreaming and microscopes. We made a fun song/art print about Eve Babitz playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. Rob has been making and showing beautiful paintings.