Someone Is Using Siri & Apple Music To Make Money From Random Song Names

If that title confuses you, I wish you could have seen how confused I was when I asked Siri how to write a letter of recommendation, and instead Siri started playing this song, by artist “Average electronic producer & DJ Pulsar” … what???

Instead of a Safari page with search results on how to write a recommendation letter, I got this instead:

Just…what is this?

From the looks of it, someone out there is creating basic, 1–2 minute long songs with obscure and commonly searched titles, in hopes that someone out there will mistakenly ask Siri to play the song. They have even gone as far as to name their songs after popular #1 chart singles from artists such as Ariana Grande, Blake Shelton, and Rihanna. Just to name a few.

See how many songs from the list above you recognize as playing on the radio now — only the songs above are basic electronic beats, not the actual songs from major artists

I tried to do some research on the artist(s) themselves, because I thought that maybe this was just some elaborate joke to mess around and have a fun time, but I came up with nothing. It didn’t help that the artist name “Average electronic producer” is incredibly vague itself.

DJ Pulsar, however, seems to be a real musician from Australia — I wonder if he knows that his DJ name is on this track? I checked his website and his Soundcloud but found no mention of this album, or of any of the songs listed above.

Not feeling the other album? How about a 22-song album with titles based on cities in Canada?

The real question is — are the songs unique? Not quite. After some digging, I found that the song “How to Use Snapchat” was almost a direct copy from the song “Meet” by this unknown artist: “Dj Pierre Matisse Feat. M. Caroselli” — an artist with no Soundcloud, no website, no Facebook. Nothing. His entire YouTube account was auto-generated by a music distribution company called Awal Digital Ltd — a seemingly legitimate company that represents and distributes tracks for artists like Die Antwoord and Yung Lean. (Awal = Artists Without A Label).

Auto-generated YouTube account with no views and no subscribers. No-one would have found it unless by accidient. I was the first viewer for every single one of their 3-month old videos.

So that’s weird. But what about the album art? That has to be unique right? Nope. The cute robot figure from Average electronic producer’s album “Canada Dark” is actually a picture of an (expensive) Toys “R” Us childrens toy:

Take a look at the toy, then check out the album artwork from “Average electronic producer”.

So what exactly is going on here?

From what I can make out of it all — it seems like a case of people try to toy with Apple’s Siri feature and bank off the fact that people, like me, are going to accidentally stumble upon the mass-produced songs — and then get paid a royalty for each song play. I can’t imagine it’s very much — but it has to be paying something considering there are so many songs published by this single fake artist — who knows how many different fake artists are out there just waiting for someone asking Siri to “play” the song “How to file my taxes 2016” — I sense a future hit from “Average electronic producer” and his fellow artists…

You can listen to the full tracklist from Average electronic producer here: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/album/house-pills/id1099241747?at=1000lc9Y&mt=1&app=music