Alleged Music Pirate Also Stole Dozens Of Hypebot Articles
RikiMusic is pirating dozens of articles from Hypebot as well as allegedly uploading tracks from indie artists to Spotify and Amazon Music without authorization.
Last week, Brett Basil of the Philadelphia based funk-rock band You Do You, and other independent musicians discovered that their tracks had been illegally uploaded to Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube using false band names and accompanied by horrible artwork.
After some investigation, the alleged culprit was identified as RikiMusic, who uploaded the tracks to the music services using no cost and Will.i.am endorsed music distributor Amuse.
When Basil contacted Amuse, they removed the album and deactivated the account without much of an explanation or any compensation.
RikiMusic continues to illegally host Brett’s tracks and others on its own site.
Wholesale Theft Of Hypebot Articles
Caleb Jackson Dills, who first wrote about the music theft for Artists Rights Watch, also noticed that the content on the RikiMusic blog looked familiar.
Virtually all of the dozens of posts on the RikiMusic site were pirated directly from Hypbot.com and illegally published verbatim without attribution.
Who Is RikiMusic?
Who is RikiMusic? It is almost impossible to tell because the site contains none of the usual contact information.
But impressively, Dills found references on the site to the username “daicadung” which he then found was being used on Github, various get rich quick scheme forums and blackhat hacker websites.
Registration of who owns the RikiMusic domain which is registered via Namecheap is hidden, as well.
We’ll share more when (or if) we learn more.
Love that you are all invested in this. I do have one correction though. I am not in You Do You , but was a mere fighter in and of pulling all this re issued and re named material off line for us all who worked so hard to create our own brand of music. You Do You , I love you and your music and I just want to set that straight..but maybe the article points out my secret desire to be in a band as cool and funky and unique as yours. Thanks-for all the great investigating and hard work Caleb and all continuing to point out to all the smaller indie musicians that al though it is his is so impossible to fathom – It really CAN happen to any one of us.
Brett Basil