Frank Ocean is one of today’s artists who mainly stays off of the grid, which leaves fans constantly feening for new music. However, it shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the R&B artist dropped his last studio album, “Blonde,” back in 2016.
Now, with the wave of AI, online users are taking advantage of him being MIA in the industry.
VICE reports that a Discord member, who goes by “mourningassasin,” scammed Frank Ocean fans out of thousands of dollars by selling AI-generated tracks that were posed as leaked songs.
The outlet details that mouringassasin only truly leaked one unreleased Frank Ocean track said to be credible on the platform. He then went on to hire a musician to make about nine fake ones with “very high quality vocal snippets” of the artist’s voice.
“Instantly, I noticed everyone started to believe it,” mourningassasin told the outlet.
Mourningassain was able to rake in roughly $10,000 (USD), from the AI scheme, offering songs for roughly $2,000-$3,000 (USD) each to communities of underground music collectors.
“A high price but not unheard of for Frank Ocean,” said Gamma, the owner of a Frank Ocean fan Discord server and collector of his rare music.
Although mourningassasin owned up to pushing out the AI music, the Discord platform banned the user from its forum.
“This situation has put a major dent in our server’s credibility, and will result in distrust from any new and unverified seller throughout these communities,” Gamma said.
When the outlet tested out uploading the fake Ocean songs to SoundCloud, it was pulled down multiple times due to copyright protections. This isn’t the first time as music streaming services have been cracking down on removing AI-generated music.
As previously reported by AfroTech, a fake Travis Scott album created by fans thanks to the controversial technology was taken down for copyright infringement after being flagged by Warner Music Group.
