NFT platform allegedly selling dozens of artists’ songs without permission
Music from smaller, independent acts to Kanye West had been listed on the platform
Aux News Software
Dozens of artists woke up on Tuesday morning to news that their music had been listed on NFT platform HitPiece without their knowledge or the proper licensing. HitPiece, a website claiming to let fans buy their favorite songs in the form of environmentally unfriendly NFTs, was accused of stealing its listings and potentially scamming buyers. The event has sparked outrage across Twitter from artists such as Jack Antonoff, Muna, and Adult Mom.
Prior to today, the website offered buyers the opportunity to bid on “One of One NFT for each unique song recording.” However, it’s unclear how they are selling the NFTs or if they even received authorization. It’s not just smaller indie artists music that can be found on the site either. There’s also music from known NFT-haters Brian Eno and Kanye West.
Producer and Bleachers frontman Antonoff took to Twitter, writing, “Any bleachers NFTs are fake. at the moment i do not believe in NFTs so anything you see associated with me isn’t real.”
“Bottom feeding scavengers of late capitalism sucking the last marrow from our bones and/or running a scam on me, you, or everyone, because obviously, I didn’t approve this, and apparently neither did anyone else you’ll see on the site,” tweeted musician Ted Leo.
Sadie Dupuis of the band Speedy Ortiz tweeted, “hey you stupid fucks @joinhitpiece we don’t have any deal with you or any NFT site and there SURE DOES LOOK like an active auction going on for a speedy ortiz song.”
Austin-based singer-songwriter Jackie Venson also shared that her music had been listed, tweeting, “These people have taken my entire catalog and put it up for sale as NFT’s without my knowledge or consent. I saw many other artists on their site too. Modern day thieves. As if it wasn’t hard enough to be a musician in this era.”
In addition to the growing number of artists who are speaking out about their music being found on the platform, record labels such as Sooper Records, Needlejuice Records, and Sunday Dinner Records have voiced their dismay at the website, saying any sale associated with any of their artists is unauthorized.
After all of the controversy raised, HitPiece wrote in a Notes app letter, “Clearly we have struck a nerve and are very eager to create the ideal experience for music fans.” HitPiece also noted that the artists, who say they did not consent to the listings, will in fact get paid from the sale.
The A.V. Club has reached out to HitPiece for comment.
63 Comments
Hahahahaha. Oh man, this is hilarious. Does it matter whether they have permission if they’re selling nothing?
Is that a Zen koan?
It should be!
Yes, it absolutely matters. This is all money that could feasibly make it to artists.
How? and…. for what?
They’re making money selling something they don’t own or have permission top sell.
Are you stupid?
Yes, this scam to get more suckers into crypto will totally make bank for the artists whose work is being used without their permission!
Absolutely not what I’m saying. I’m saying any money made off an artist’s work could feasibly be theirs with similar effort/advisory.
Either you forgot the /s or… well, I don’t want to say it so just remember to put /s at the end, okay?
What a remarkably insufferable way to tell someone you disagree with them.
Look, I don’t know you so you might be one of those people who just doesn’t understand how this scam works. I don’t work on the “conflict for conflict’s sake” scale so, just, please don’t fall for this bullshit? Also, since when did trying to help people become insufferable?
They’re just selling pirated music in a bizarre fashion. It’s like someone selling pirated CDs on a subway train, but they only have one CD, and it’s a single, and it costs $10,000.
If you hear a noise, it’s just my head exploding.
and the CD doesn’t actually have the song on it
It’s more like someone selling the right to write someone’s name down in their book next to someone’s favorite song.
You don’t wanna piss off Adult Mom.
You missed the best angle on this, that MC Serch from 3rd Bass is one of the owners!
Read the comments…
The idiocy of the whole NFT space is just incredible.
I’m so “shocked”.
David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven has a lot of tweets on the subject.
Lowery is absolutely dragging these dumb motherfuckers. Love it.
G/O MediaBottom feeding scavengers of late capitalism sucking the last marrow from our bones and/or running a scam on me, you, or everyone, because obviously, I didn’t approve this, and apparently neither did anyone else you’ll see on the site
Everyone is really going to be surprised to find out this is only middle stage capitalism. Just wait until the comments become slideshows, or you have to watch a 30 second ad to post a comment.
This has been going on since NFTs became a thing. People stealing other artists work and then profiting off of it. Seán Doran who does image processing, primarily of data from planetary spacecraft and observatories, last year, or maybe two years ago -what is time anymore- had a number of his works pop up on NFT sites, without his permission or knowledge, until someone made him aware it was going on.
This is true. But the vast scale of this and the enormous number of small-time artists sucked into this (like me!) was…noteworthy.
“HitPiece also noted that the artists, who say they did not consent to the listings, will in fact get paid from the sale.”
They sure will, and it’s likely to be a lot more than you think…
is HitPiece otherwise a respectable (as far as that goes) NFT site?Because if this is some server farm in Russia this makes sense, but if this is somebody whose identity can be ascertained then that person is going to be sued like a motherfucker and possibly criminally prosecuted for wire fraud, which sounds fun!
It is not. It came out of nowhere as various artists found themselves listed on it.They took all the content off their site when people found out. Honestly 50/50 odds whether they sincerely thought they could get away with this or if getting everybody mad at them was just a publicity scheme. You’d think getting every musician to hate you would be a poor move for a music-adjacent company, but in the NFT space hype is the whole business.
I was thinking if any of the sales successfully went through and HitPiece received moneyIf they never received money it’s questionable how badly they could be sued…attempted wire fraud seems questionable…I can’t wait until they figure out who these people are.
The dude behind this appears to have been doxxed (I won’t post the details, it’s findable if you want to find it), so I expect the finding out portion of fuck around & find out is about to get underway.
teeheestill amazing that it was called an NFT Platform and Music NFT Site as if it had already been in the business, by basically everybody, instead of a spam site, a scam site, etc. I mean scam site and NFT mean the same thing basically but rly it shouldn’t be this easy.Actually, it was Eve6 who said the guy’s name on twitter (Rory Felton), saying that he has been involved in the music business so he definitely knew this would not “work” https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/music/hitpiece-nft-songs
Yeah, I love how he pivoted to “We Started The Conversation” and left off the second half of the sentence “And Got Punched In Our Stupid-Ass Mouth Hole”.It looks like a lot of what he had up were not “biddable” or whatever, but one of the ones where you could actually enter a “bid” was from Drake. A lot of the indies were like “Listen friends, just sit back and let the majors do the heavy lifting of destroying this man and his site where they stand.”
haha I think it says the guy exited a label to work directly for SONY, soon to be another thing he “exited”Apparently he had already raised $5MM (who knows the level of commitment but if he is Sony-adjacent it could be real)…I wonder how those investors like these optics. He’s like Spotify hold my beer.
It’s not getting doxxed if you’re on LinkedIn and people like you up on there.
I was more talking about the photos of the dude’s house and his address that were making the rounds. Everyone knows who he is at this point.
There is no such things as a respectable NFT site. Kinda end of story on that.I’d link it but I guarantee someone beat me to it, but go type “Line Goes Up” into YouTube if you want the long answer.
3rd Bass’s MC Serch is one of the co-founders.
respectable NFT sitepick one
There is no such thing as a “respectable” NFT site
It’s all very weird. It came out of nowhere, with a few million in VC, had a big launch party with Busta Rhymes, and puttered quietly selling nothing until this blew up.
Which was apparently their plan all along. Felton has a few decades in the music industry, so it’s not like he’s a clueless tech bro thinking “i can disrupt this!” without understanding what industry legal is like – he knows the workings. It appears that his plan was to let a bunch of lawsuits crop up, but since no money was changing hands, they’d all just go away, and in the meantime they’d have publicity and name recognition in the market space which could be leveraged into legitimate deals.
What’s curious is that right down the the artist IDs, this is all clearly data pulled from Spotify. The photos, the images, the titles, all of it. Which would mean it’s in direct contravention of the Spotify Developer Terms of Service, Section IV (the bit about caching and hosting content from spotify) so either they blatantly disregarded it or Spotify let it slide. Both options are unsettling.
it sounds a little bit like a very public nervous breakdown
definitely being cynical here, but i wouldn’t be shocked if the ‘future’ of nfts is artists suing nft ‘owners’ for stuff they made originally and the nft ‘owners’ winning the case, thus setting the legal precedent. so many artists who are even interested in nfts can’t mint their own because someone else minted their art first. not that i’m weeping for less nfts but it seems like the ‘point’ of them was eroded before they even really started.
It’s hard to imagine that these lawsuits won’t be garden-variety copyright disputes, once they start happening. A court would have to decide that selling a copy of something isn’t infringing copyright if the copy is unique, which is nonsensical on its face.
i’ve long since given up that this world works in any logical or sensible way haha.i 100% agree with you but i don’t count anything out.
There is no legal theory to support that. If you buy a physical work of art, you only acquire the object and the right to display it. You do not own the right to reproduce it or create derivative works. We have centuries of legal precedent for selling art, the fact that it is a digital copy with a Certificate of Authenticity does not change the underlying fact that the artist retains all other elements of copyright unless there is an explicit contract transferring those right. Unauthorized NFTs are even weaker as you don’t get the right to display them since it is a longstanding principal that a thief can not pass on a clean title. The first time someone attempts to assert copyright against Disney we will have a clear court case in short order.
So they think it’s fine to steal something, sell it, and then compensate the owner in some fashion?
OK, I’m going to sell my neighbor’s car for them and then give them some of the money. I’m sure they’ll be cool with that.
YoU
wOUldn’T
NFT
a CaR
I would mint NFTs of the 3D printer files for all of the parts to make a car.
You wouldn’t kill a policeman and then steal his helmet.You wouldn’t NFT in his helmet.And then send it to his grieving widow.And then steal it again!
NFT’s being stolen from an artist is about as much news as politicians being dishonest. Next.
It’s way, way more than dozens. They basically trawled spotify for any artist with more than a few hundred listeners. I know dozens of *local bands* that got slurped up.
This whole thing is weird. Like as far as I can tell they were hoping to skirt by on the “we’re selling NFTs, not the music itself” loophole, since there’s no regulation for ownership of the rights to mint one. They expected the eventual legal challenges to do nothing but drum up publicity so they could “go legit” by shwoing the industry that there’s a real demand for NFTs and they should make deals with them before someone less scrupulous did it.
They approached NFTs like a mafia protection racket. “Nice content ya got there, be a real shame if someone minted NFTs for it. Maybe you just let us do it, or next time someone will do it who won’t be so nice, eh?”
But they made a few critical errors – the big one was using cover art on their website without permission. THAT’S massive copyright infringement (as well as a violation of the Spotify Developer Terms of service) and likely caught the attention of Disney Legal, Destroyer of Worlds.
Why Disney? Where do they fall in all this?
Disney is very aggressive about defending their IP, and have a large team of the best lawyers money can buy. Every time copyright protections on Mickey Mouse get close to expiring, they successfully lobby for changes to ensure they maintain control. They’re an absolute juggernaut, and if you mess with their stuff, they’ll do the legal equivalent of nuking you from orbit.
One of the top “auctions” on their was the “Tokyo Disney Theme” and the other was “Music from Star Wars: Rebels.” And you KNOW how Disney gets about commercially using their IP for stuff without proper attribution or license.
“You come to me, on this, the day of my daughter’s wedding, and ask me to funge a token?”
NFTs are nothing but scams, so why not just scam from the very start?
On the plus side, that Nigerian prince will be so busy selling NFTs, that my junk folder will get some relief.
Sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the lawyer that has to explain to a Judge what a NFT is.
They’re not selling the songs, they’re selling LINKS to the songs. They believe it’s legal, because a link to the song is not under copyright. Of course, you’d have to explain why it makes sense to buy a link to a song…
My god everyone is so incredibly stupid.
This is a complete scam in an entirely different way than NFTs are usually a scam!
Funny how this is the complete opposite of what the cryptobros promised. All that bullshit about a new frontier that will lead to artists getting better paid for their art and having more control over how it’s distributed. Instead scammers are just stealing their work and auctioning it off because NFTs are an unregulated cesspit of stupidity.After all of the controversy raised, HitPiece wrote in a Notes app letter, “Clearly we have struck a nerve and are very eager to create the ideal experience for music fans.”Blatantly stealing people’s work and then auctioning it off does tend to “strike a nerve.” God, what a weaselly way of phrasing it. HitPiece also noted that the artists, who say they did not consent to the listings, will in fact get paid from the sale.That’s not how licensing works! Even if you give the artists 100% of the sale price, that doesn’t change the fact you took and sold their stuff without their consent! They have to agree BEFORE you make the sale, hell, before you even think about making the NFTs to begin with!JFC, did these morons really think any of this would fly? What a joke.
They are not selling music. They are selling nothing. Literally. You get nothing if you buy one of these songs from them. Or any nft from anywhere.
What I don’t get is that individual blockchain entries aren’t even enough data storage to host a song. It would literally just be a digital tag that says haloteabag69 owns Jackie Venson’s catalogue. No one can be this stupid.