Imposters are making as much as $10K in royalties at a time by uploading copyright-infringing content to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music
When songs leak on Spotify and Apple Music, illegal uploads can generate substantial royalty payments—but for whom? Tweets: @bourgwick and @pitchfork Tweets: Jesse Jarnow / @bourgwick : bootlegging of outtakes continues in the streaming age. https://twitter.com/... @pitchfork : One leaker told Pitchfork they made more than $60,000 in royalties this year, after uploading unreleased tracks by Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, and more onto Spotify and Apple Music https://pitchfork.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Pitchfork's reporting puts a dollar figure on a problem platforms had treated as background noise: one leaker says they cleared more than $60,000 this year by uploading unreleased Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert tracks to Spotify and Apple Music, with single uploads pulling up to $10K in royalties before takedowns catch up. The economics are simple — streaming pays per play regardless of who uploaded the file, so an imposter monetizes demand for leaks that the rights holders can't serve.
The story sits inside a longer arc of streaming-era leakage: Spotify's own detection systems were later shown to have a loophole letting unauthorized remixes ride in as podcasts, blockchain streamer Audius has struggled with unlicensed Kanye West and Drake albums, and bad metadata was already estimated to have left billions unpaid to artists. What Pitchfork documents is the earliest clear evidence that leaking itself became a revenue business.
First-order effects
- Rights holders for Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, and other leaked artists lose royalty income and release-timing control every time an imposter upload goes live, while the leaker pockets payments that would otherwise flow through official channels.
Second-order effects
- Spotify and Apple Music face pressure to tighten pre-release fingerprinting and takedown speed, because every fraudulent payout erodes label trust in their royalty systems — the same trust gap that later surfaced in industry-wide fraud estimates running to $2B a year from bot farms and relabeled work.
Third-order effects
- If leak-monetization scales, streaming platforms drift toward policing uploads like distribution gatekeepers rather than open pipes, pushing verification costs onto distributors and independent artists alike — a structural shift already visible in the platform-side fixes that followed, from Spotify's podcast loophole closure to its later AI-persona labeling.
The trend: Music streaming is shifting from passive royalty plumbing toward active content authentication, as platforms discover that paying per play without verifying ownership turns leaks into a business.