As some readers may remember, last year, Tone Deaf recounted the tale of Vulfpeck, a then-little known Swedish indie group who decided they were going to cheat the Spotify system by releasing an album of absolute silence.
The plan was pretty clever. The band would release the album and then urge fans to stream it as they sleep. Spotify would do the rest of the work, depositing royalty payments into the band’s account as the streams racked up.
Vulfpeck were hoping to use the funds to finance a string of free shows for their fans, but after Spotify officials discovered their plan (it wasn’t hard, everyone from Rolling Stone to Pitchfork wrote about it), they put the kibosh on their grand scheme.
It was the first highly publicised case of someone rigging the Spotify system, which many say is rigged in the favour of major labels to begin with. Tone Deaf also recently wrote about Eternify, a Spotify hack which allows users to “stream their favourite artists forever”.
But what happens when you upload someone else’s music to Spotify, or for that matter iTunes, the Amazon store, Tidal, and other music services and try and pass it off as your own? Well, apparently that can also work.
That’s what a singer going by the name “Lucia Cole” allegedly did. As Digital Music News reports, Cole uploaded an album called Innocence to several music services where her sweetly sung, if sappy, pop tunes were available to stream and purchase.
The twist? All of the songs on the album are actually Jessica Simpson recordings from the early 2000s with either identical or slightly altered titles. Her song ‘Forbidden’, for example, is actually Jessica Simpson’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’.
As NPR reports, the whole thing appears to be a strange case of catfishing, only the victim in this case is anyone who bought Cole’s album. That is, whoever uploaded the albums to those services. See, no one’s sure if “Lucia Cole” exists.
The Cole recordings (aka Simpson recordings) appeared on the internet on 28th May, supposedly released through Republic Records, which is owned by Universal Music Group. Then, last week, the blog Pop Culture Died In 2009 noticed that Lucia Cole’s songs sounded awfully familiar.
After the story began making the rounds, with some calling it a scam, some calling it a highly orchestrated art project, and others dubbing it a hall of fame-level catfish, reporters began putting in calls to Republic Records, Cole’s supposed label.
“I called Republic Records, the supposed home of Lucia Cole, at 4:00 p.m,” NPR‘s Jacob Ganz recounts. “To zero surprise, a spokesperson confirmed that nobody by that name is signed to the label. By 8:30 p.m., all of Cole’s music had been removed from iTunes.”
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Cole’s Wikipedia page was deleted last week, her Twitter feed has also been deleted, images purported to be her are in fact taken from a model’s Instagram account, and Cole or whoever is claiming to be “Lucia Cole” has not responded to requests for comment from NPR.
An email sent by NPR to the contact address that was listed on her Twitter page was returned as undeliverable.
Meanwhile, many are wondering how such a brazen act of intellectual property theft could’ve been committed in the first place. SoundCloud uses red flag software that keeps copyrighted music from being uploaded to its servers. Wouldn’t someone at iTunes have noticed Cole uploaded Jessica Simpson tracks?
At the end of the day, this whole thing isn’t that strange, right? Someone managed to upload copyrighted material to some music services, and catfishing, hoaxes, and flat out lies on the internet are nothing new.
But the whole Lucia Cole thing gets stranger and more elaborate the deeper you dig. For example, Lucia Cole’s Twitter feed had more than 64,000 followers, there’s at least one interview with Cole posted online, and Shaquille O’Neal endorsed her album on Twitter, writing, “Can you say new Mariah Carey? It’s fire.”
According to a Soundscan report, no song by Lucia Cole has sold more than five copies. But if it was apparently this easy to pull off such a hoax, how many more Lucia Coles are out there?
