Can we please talk about bootleg VOCALOID releases on streaming?
The recent "Triple Baka" upload tied to Vante Records is what finally pushed me to make this post, because this keeps happening and I feel like people outside the scene still do not fully get why it is such a problem.
If you are newer to VOCALOID, I do not blame you for assuming that if something is on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc., it must be official. That is a normal assumption. The problem is that in VOCALOID, that is just not always true. A lot of unauthorized uploads get pushed onto streaming, dressed up with nice-looking cover art, artist credits, and a clean release page, and then people stream them without questioning where they actually came from..
With this "Triple Baka" case, a lot of things immediately felt off. The credits were weird, the whole presentation felt disconnected from the song's actual history, and the earlier cover art looked heavily derived from the original fan MV art in a way that came off really questionable. Then later the art changed again, which honestly just made the whole thing feel even messier instead of more trustworthy.
And this is not just one random case. We have seen this happen with songs like "Triple Baka," "Teto Territory," "Fear Garden," and "Momiagewo shakaagewo" under names like 2hot4tv, aki <3, mahoushoujo, melody :3, Decaying, corpse ☆, torncorpses, Fahmi, and more.
^(And before anyone tries to lump me into this kind of thing, I want to say this clearly: I have literally had people accuse) ^(me)^(, HuxP, of "reuploading" music onto streaming before, which is not true. There was even a Reddit post a while back trying to paint me like I was just reposting cosMo's music. I am a cover artist. My releases are covers, and I get cover licenses for them. My tuning and mixing are my own, and I have said this before, but people still see a topic upload or a streaming page and jump to the worst possible conclusion. It is frustrating, especially when actual unauthorized uploads are a real problem and should be the focus instead. My music nowadays isn't on streaming, but I still think this is an important to bring up within this post.)
If you actually want to support the original artists, please do not just blindly stream suspicious uploads because they are convenient. Go watch the original music video on YouTube if it is available. Check NicoNico when possible. Look into databases like VocaDB and MusicBrainz. Support official uploads, official albums, and official artist pages whenever you can. Because even if one of these unauthorized releases gets taken down later, the person behind it may have already made money from it, and then they can just come back under another distributor or another alias and do it all over again.
I am just tired of seeing VOCALOID songs, and the people behind them, get flattened into disposable streaming content for somebody else's profit.