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
Noah Yoo / Pitchfork : 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 lands mid-arc in a running series on streaming's integrity gaps: months earlier, bad and inconsistent song metadata was estimated to have left billions unpaid to artists, and the same summer bootleggers found that Spotify and Apple Music's upload pipelines would pay royalties on unreleased Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert tracks to whoever uploaded them first.
The pattern didn't stop at leaked tracks — a year later Variety documented unauthorized remixes slipping through as podcasts on Spotify, Billboard found unlicensed albums from Kanye West and Drake on blockchain streamer Audius, and by 2024 the New York Times was sizing streaming fraud, including bot farms and relabeled work, at roughly $2B a year by Beatdapp's estimate.
First-order effects
- Imposters who upload unreleased tracks collect real royalty payouts — up to $10K per upload, with one leaker claiming over $60K this year — while the rights-holding artists (Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert) lose both revenue and control of their release calendars.
Second-order effects
- Spotify and Apple Music are pushed into an arms race on automated copyright detection, which the later podcast-uploophole reporting shows they keep losing; every takedown regime they tighten raises friction for legitimate independent distributors too.
Third-order effects
- If fraud scales toward the $2B/year level Beatdapp estimates, platforms face pressure to shift payout models away from raw stream counts toward verified-identity and provenance checks — the same verification logic now surfacing in Spotify's AI Persona labeling and Apple Music's AI-generated-song labels.
The trend: Streaming economics are forcing platforms to treat identity and provenance verification — of uploads, profiles, and AI-generated content alike — as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought.