You're on the Net reading this, so you're familiar with email spammers who fill your inbox with junk. But have you heard of the song spammer? They infest streaming sites like Spotify. The Echo Nest senior software engineer Aaron Mandel explains the various categories of musical spammers:
The very best type of music spammers — the ones whose music elicits the best mix of hysterical laughter and retributive threats when you play them for friends — are the cloners. These groups record their own versions of popular songs, replicating the originals as closely as possible with whatever time and talent they have. (Spoiler: Often, that’s not very closely.)
These cloned songs are credited to “artists” such as The Hit Crew, Hip Hop’s Finest, #1 Hits Now, DJ New Release — names that could, and often do, pass for compilation titles. They might be named after the very song they’re cloning (“Call Me Maybe,” “Thrift Shop”) or a lyric from it (“Here’s My Number,” “Party Rock Is In The House Tonight”). The name doesn’t matter, so long as it’s close enough to fool people into clicking on the track without thinking twice. [...]
The most amazing one that I’ve found to date is Charts Hits 2013’s clone of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” It features a vocalist who makes no attempt to sound like Macklemore, and even so, he’s in way over his head. Clearly, the guy is reading from a lyric sheet. He says “mezzanine” like it rhymes with “nine” and says that he’s draped in a “Leonard mink.” The horn riff is also agonizingly squared off, with every note played at exactly the same volume.
This “Thrift Shop” clone is on the Spotify playlist of musical spam we mentioned above, but really, it’s way too good to miss, so here’s a YouTube link too.