Martin Garrix Rips Apart Fake Artists Uploading His Unreleased Music To Spotify Accounts

Spotify is by far the largest digital streaming service available in music today. The platform has helped artists take their releases from the non-monetized Soundcloud platform and allowed them to begin to profit (albeit, very minimally) from streams of their music. That being said, the streaming service does still have some issues they need to work out. Martin Garrix has been the victim of one of these faults time and time again. Now he has truly had enough.

Martin Garrix Goes After Fake Artists

Martin Garrix has a wealth of unreleased material. He is constantly playing out IDs in his sets. Not only is this exciting for the crowd, but it also helps Garrix gauge the track by the crowd’s reaction. Since many sets are recorded these days, anyone is able to rip the unreleased tunes and upload them to Spotify under their personal profile as copyright software will not detect them.

Unfortunately, this has happened many times to Marty, and today he has officially had enough. He dropped a statement on his Instagram story saying he was exhausted by fake producers taking credit for his hard work. So if you are one of those people who partake in theft – stop. We all want to continue hearing unreleased Martin Garrix during his sets. Check out his statement below.

Garrix isn’t too happy about some of his unreleased music getting uploaded to fake accounts from r/EDM

A Problem That Never Really Went Away

This kind of ID theft turned into a running headache for producers across the industry, not just Garrix, as streaming platforms struggled to keep pace with how quickly bootlegged festival recordings could be ripped, cleaned up, and uploaded under a fake artist name. Copyright detection systems are generally built to catch officially registered tracks, which leaves a huge loophole for unreleased material that’s never been formally copyrighted or filed anywhere.

Streaming platforms have gotten somewhat better at taking down these fake uploads once flagged, but it usually requires the actual artist or their team to notice and report it, exactly what happened here. For a producer as prolific with unreleased IDs as Garrix, staying vigilant about this kind of theft has basically become a part of the job, a frustrating side effect of just how much demand there is for his music before it’s even officially out.