A Grifter Using AI Stole a St. Louis Band’s Entire Album to Game Spotify

When Americana band Old Capital Square Dance Club released its album Old Capital in 2019, the RFT lauded its "marriage of truck-driving tracks and country music."

The album has its shares of rollicking barn-burners even as several of its tracks limn small-town strife and economic worry.

The band hails from Jesse McClary and Zach Anderson’s hometown of Vandalia, Illinois, a town of about 7,000 an hour from St. Louis. Vandalia's claim to fame is that until 1837 it was the capital of Illinois. McClary, Anderson and their bandmates practiced in the basement of a daycare that long ago had been a nightclub called the Old Capital Square Dance Club.

"I was very proud of the album," says frontman McClary of Old Capital. "A lot of it was based on real-life experiences."

Now, almost five years later, the album is finding a new, even bigger audience than when it was released.

There's a long, quirky history of this sort of thing happening. Crate-digging vinyl collectors uncover a gem unheralded in its time. A few seconds of a track go viral on TikTok.

But something even stranger has happened to Old Capital. A grifter making liberal use of artificial intelligence appears to have ripped it off.

It was Drew Lance who uncovered the theft.

Lance, the new-ish drummer for the band, was prepping for an upcoming gig at the Broadway Oyster Bar and listening to the album on Spotify. The music streaming app's recommendation algorithm eventually served Lance up a track by the artist Marico Charlotte.

Lance noticed that a Marico Charlotte song, "The Loose Change," sounded an awful lot like Old Capital's "Loose Change."

That's because they were virtually the same.

The "band" Marico Charlotte seems to be little more than some strategically cropped stock art as well as a catalog of tunes that sound an awful lot like other people’s music. 

Marico’s “The Loose Change” is just Old Capital’s “Loose Change,” except with its tempo sped up and its vocals pitch-shifted down. This was presumably done to fool Spotify's "Plagiarism Risk Detector" that automatically scans music on the platform for copyright violations. However, anyone who isn't a computer can tell that the two songs are basically the same.

Every other song on the 2019 album had gone through a similar process. “American Dream” became Marico’s “The American Dream.” “Emily” became “The Emily.” Marico’s most original move was changing the title of “Stranger Now” to “Now Strangers.” 

"The song titles are just so silly, so lazy, it made me laugh," says Anderson. 

McClary says that at first he got excited, thinking maybe someone had included one of their tracks on a covers album. But quickly he realized that wasn't the case. His work had simply been pilfered.

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COURTESY OF OLD CAPITAL SQUARE DANCE CLU

Old Capital Square Dance Club on the stage.

St. Louis-based musician and recording engineer Ryan Wasoba says it would have taken very little effort to alter the tracks in this sort of fashion.

"I could do that kind of manipulation to someone's album, realistically, in probably 90 seconds," he tells the RFT.

Wasoba says that after he heard about what had happened to Old Capital, he started sleuthing. He made a video on TikTok showing that Marico Charlotte tracks were on a playlist created by user "Nathaniel Yee" (likely not, Wasoba notes, the user's real name).

Yee’s playlist had 19 hours of music on it, much of which had been released by artists with names that sound suspiciously as if they’d been generated by a chatbot and whose music catalogs were chock-full of pitched-shifted, sped-up tracks.

Wasoba tells the RFT he quickly uncovered six similar playlists to Yee’s, each with about 30 artists on them. Even though Spotify pays out only $0.003 a stream, Wasoba says that after crunching some numbers, he thinks these playlists are still generating tens of thousands of dollars.

An article last year from the Guardian suggested at least some of this bogus streaming could be tied to money laundering.

Spotify does make efforts to keep this sort of pilfered content off their platform, but as Marico Charlotte’s album and Nathaniel Yee’s playlist demonstrate, they’re losing the arms race against the people who may be grifters or money launderers or some combination of both. (Spotify did not respond to our email seeking comment yesterday.) 

"You spend all that time and money to make music. It's everything," says Anderson. "To have that robbed from you, it feels gross."

McClary says that he hopes his band's story can be something of a wake-up call for this problem on music streaming services.

That attitude is part of McClary's broader determination to turn a "gut punch" into a great opportunity.

McClary's 9 to 5 job is at T-shirt screen printing company St. Louis Sportswear, and he's currently designing "robots stole my music” shirts to sell at Old Capital Square Dance Club shows, including their next gig on May 25 at Broadway Oyster Bar.

"It was my wife, Nikki's, idea to use the Apple font," he says.

He adds that in the wake of his posting on Facebook about Marico Charlotte, the band has seen more engagement than ever.

Old Capital Square Dance Club’s plan is to release two singles a month for a full year, after which they will have an album that feels both like a mixtape and a collection of singles.

McClary had already started this project before he'd ever even heard of Marico Charlotte.

In fact, the day before Lance brought the ripped-off album to the band’s attention, McClary had written and recorded one of those singles.

That song was called, "Maybe Your Favorite Band Wants You Dead."

He describes the song as such: "It’s an absurdist take on the modern life cycle of a band. Like how the Rolling Stones could basically become robots at this point."

You can compare the two songs below. First, the original, then after it, Marico Charlotte's version.