47 minutes ago, Jack said:

This song is an absolute horror, I hope it does nothing

I don’t think it’s going to.

Surely changing his name also stops people from finding the track?? What is going on 😂

I was quite pleased to hear that Spotify made sure no royalty payments went out.

Was its "popularity" on there all down to streaming farms or something similar? Also its apparent TikTok popularity engineered?

10 hours ago, lewistgreen said:

Surely changing his name also stops people from finding the track?? What is going on 😂

It stopped me from finding it until I saw the link you posted on here. 😂

Edited Saturday at 08:133 days by James.

Are we sure about this name change thing? Cos on my Spotify it's still showing as HAVEN. and I can't find an artist called HVN!

I think they're still in the process of changing his artist name properly, at the moment it's showing up under BOTH names

What a farce

Their original stream count appears to have been reinstated and now there are 2 versions of the same song.

Good video from Mistajam here confirming the background to what's happened

Watched both of them and I love how neutral he was about it, none of his thoughts and opinions were mentioned!

It does seem like in the pursuit of information, there's a game of telephone where any valid information gets mixed in with bad faith interpretations that exaggerate the truth because somewhere in the chain is someone who wants it to be true. In this case, not because they like the idea of an AI record, but the opposite, and so they want to smear every facet of the two together to associate a record they don't like with an unpopular buzz word. I always see people saying things that aren't true to justify disliking someone (because there aren't enough true reasons I guess?) and it's hard to tell if they know it's false or not. It's a big credibility blow to anyone I see parroting this stuff without regard.

Similarly, I thought the very rapid rise around the world was unusual, but it didn't feel suspect to me. The climbs were always pretty uniform across different countries in a manner that's difficult to fake. I don't claim to know how the TikTok machine spins its wheels and how an unknown producer can make it there, but that kind of virality has existed since the early days of YouTube and before that. Things can spread very quickly, and this song's hook got stuck in my head very quickly too. Not a fan of deep fake voice impersonation filters if that's what it is, but maybe this can all be a blueprint for the way this is all treated in the future. It's very annoying to have to consider that someone can have a social media page and only be sure they're a real person because their posts date back to more than a year ago. It's the sheer 'name is mud' aspect that makes me think AI is gonna have a hard time getting past the 'tricking people into listening to it' angle after the current novelty has passed. I await the bubble burst.

New Entry today on Spotify at 81 for HVN.

Seems like it could actually be picking right up where it left then 😮

It’s still viral, and the new version just replaced the old version, so it appears to have kept most (if not all) its original stream count and playlisting. The song just repeats the same verse and “I run” over and over for 2 minutes so I don’t understand what people think is so good about it.

Edited Monday at 16:581 day by Pineapple_

If anything this controversy might be an advantage. I went out of my way to listen to this song because of the drama which I otherwise would never would have done so.