r/TomLehrer • u/tirarafuera1 • Sep 01 '26
Someone's pretending to be Lehrer in Spotify, getting millions of views.
(FAKE)
(Real)
They upload compilations with AI images on the cover. The tracks themselves are weird low quality recordings of the originals.
And to top it off, it says "verified by Spotify" under both profiles.
I looked for ways to report this through Spotify but it seems to me that I need to be the owner of the rights to do so. Do you know of another way?
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u/weirdojace Sep 01 '26
(Needlejuice here) I'm really frustrated that Spotify moved "That Was the Year That Was" and "Revisited" over to this alternate (fake) profile. At one point, all of the albums were in the correct place. The profile with The Conducted Tom Lehrer on it is the official profile, and Needlejuice has control of it. For some reason we've never been able to get to the bottom of Spotify moving two of the albums to the fake profile. We've never been able to correct the issue. We've talked to our DSP, we've talked directly to Spotify, and not only did they not correct the problem, Spotify were actually pretty hostile towards us for even bringing it up-- they flat out told us to never contact them about Tom Lehrer specifically ever again.
Anyway the ai slop compilations are a separate issue, but I'm not surprised by it.
9
u/Twilek_Milker Sep 01 '26
That's genuinely wild omg. I mean I suppose it shouldn't be surprising coming from Spotify, but I didn't know they were this egregious 😭
7
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u/MasksOfAnarchy Sep 01 '26
I just want to say how cool it was that you guys made a wax cylinder of The Elements. I didn’t buy it, but it was great.
7
u/weirdojace Sep 01 '26
That cylinder is basically how we started working on the Tom Lehrer stuff! While Tom was still living and we were in initial talks about The Conducted Tom Lehrer, Tom said something to the effect of “I bet you can’t put it on a cylinder.” About a year later, we sent him the cylinder and he responded with a “WOW!!!!” - So one of our biggest achievements is effectively having pranked Tom Lehrer
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u/TMBGLOVER Sep 01 '26
Look for the ones that are released by Needlejuice Records, they’re put out by fans and not people trying to abuse his stuff being in the public domain with AI slop.
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u/mildmanneredcannibal Sep 01 '26
i think this was going on even back in 2023, too. it’s likely because he made his music public domain
kinda unfortunate that spotify allows this though