Musicians are complaining about their works being turned into NFTs without their permission.
The website HitPiece claims to sell one-of-a-kind NFTs of artists. “Each HitPiece NFT is a one-of-one NFT for each unique song recording,” the claim states. “Members build their hitlist of their favorite songs, get on leaderboards, and receive in real life value such as access and experiences with artists.” Except HitPiece didn’t work with artists as claimed.
Eve 6 tweeted a link to their songs on the HitPiece website, saying they’re “selling nfts of our band and many others without permission. If you’re in a band click the link you may be on here. cease and desist motherf*ckers, nfts are fraud.”
“These people have taken my entire catalog and put it up for sale as NFT’s without my knowledge or consent. I saw many other artists on their site too. Modern-day thieves. As if it wasn’t hard enough to be a musician in this era,” tweeted Jackie Venson.
HitPiece has ripped off the work of artists like BTS, Britney Spears, and Brian Eno. Artists have been blasting the website all week, telling the creators to remove the images of their album covers. After the Twitter brouhaha, the HitPiece website briefly went offline. It has since returned with a tagline reading, “we started the conversation, and we’re listening.”
The HitPiece website also tweeted what looks like a half-hearted apology for ripping off artists’ work. “Clearly we have struck a nerve and are very eager to create the ideal experience for music fans,” the tweet reads. “To be clear, artists get paid when digital goods are sold on HitPiece. Like all beta products, we are continuing to listen to all user feedback and are committed to evolving the product to fit the needs of the artists, labels, and fans alike.”
I’m not entirely sure how artists are getting paid for their works when so many artists didn’t even know about the project. Several artists have blasted HitPiece and at least two record labels sent cease and desist notices to the developers of this ‘project.’ “HitPiece is 100% hosting unauthorized sales of NFTs related to Sooper Artists,” Sooper Records tweeted. “They’ll absolutely be hearing from us. F*ck this website.”
SEC needs to get involved. This is Wall Street piracy at worse.
What will happen is that publishing, songwriter and mechanical royalties will be added into the blockchain so that songwriters, labels and artists can get paid.
Additionally, there should be an automatic digital wallet created for the songs original owner and beware of the performing rights societies.
What “WILL happen”? So they can just sell something with my name and likeness without my permission, that’s okay, so long as they cut me in on the deal at some point?
No.
NFTs are ether. The less attention paid to them, and the fewer people recognizing this absolute bs, the quicker they will fade away.
Now another scam site Streamer.fm is doing the same. It’s scraped all of Spotify for images and uses an imbedded YouTube audio player for music with absolutely no permission from artists. Similarly using NFTs with no permission or payment system in place.