A beloved American rock band’s Spotify page appears to have been taken over by Russian rappers. Is this a scam? A mistake? A strange third act from some beloved alt-rockers? Kelefa Sanneh investigates. Bye-Bye - Cake, PulyaNaVetru Support the show! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Check, check, check, check, check. All right. Are we doing an intro? I don't have an intro. No, I'm just, I can say, hi, Kay. Do you want me to do a whole thing or no? If you have somehow prepared a thing, you can always do a thing. Do you have a thing? You don't even know why you're here. How can you have a thing?
Well, the thing about the podcast world, PJ, is it can be kind of competitive. It can be very exciting. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but that kind of competition can cause hurt feelings. Certainly. It can cause people to grow unhappy, resentful even. Are you feeling those feelings?
No, but I appreciate the fact that although you have your own podcast that you're working on, you don't feel so competitive that you're not willing to invite the host of a competing podcast, Search Engine Engine. The show that has been launched within my show and apparently is now competing with my show. That's right.
This podcast Califah hosts, a competitor to Search Engine called Search Engine Engine does in fact exist. There's one episode so far published behind our paywall, which means it's only available to our incognito mode listeners. But that was not why Kay was here today. Kay knows more about music than anybody I know.
He has a book called Major Labels that somehow covers the entire evolution of pop music in a fun and breezy way. If I have a question about music that I can't answer, he's the person I always go to. Okay, we got a listener question that I wanted to ask you about. I'm going to lead up to that question first to set a little bit of context.
I think I know the answer to this question, but just in case there's a random lacuna in your musical knowledge. Are you familiar with the band Cake? Yes, I am. How would you describe their music?
Spritely indie rock with kind of talky vocals over the top. Do you like them or not like them? I like them a little bit. Sacramento, if I'm not mistaken. Is that where they're from? I think so, yeah. The big hit is Short Skirt, Long Jacket. Is that correct? Yeah. I remember in the early 2000s, I think there was crossover with this Brooklyn band called Chick Chick Chick.
A guy who played in Chick Chick Chick, I think, had played with Cake and then actually later ended up playing with LCD Sound System.
There's a saying before GPS was widespread where they used to study the brains of London cabbies. And there was like a part of their brain that either lit up more or maybe had grown more. I'm sure that's wrong. But it was just sort of a scientific marvel how the human mind could expand to
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Chapter 2: Why is there a new song by Cake on Spotify?
No, no. If you had not mentioned Cake and you'd asked me to list 500 groups that might have influenced this, Cake would not be among them.
So our listener had been curious about why Cake was releasing such an un-Cake-like song. And our listener was not the only person wondering about this. Okay, there's this website called Reddit where fans of something, whether it's a band or a podcast, can gather to talk about how that thing used to be better in the past. Reddit, you say? I try not to go.
And on the Cake subreddit, people were losing their minds about this new song. Somebody says, I'm just going to read this, quote, Hi, fellow fans. Does anyone know the story of this song? Just released on Spotify, but definitely doesn't sound like the cake I know. Does anybody have any information about it for me or about the other band, Pull Ya Net Vetru?
I can't find anything with my meager Google skills, if only there was a podcast for this. He didn't say that. Someone else chimes in, just like to say one thing, what the actual fuck is this song? It's in a different language. And then the third person says, I'm so confused. Is this a hack? Is this a hack? Which basically, it seems like there's three possible theories for what has happened here.
One, which I would like to be true, but I'm pretty sure is not true, is just that Cake was like, we're pivoting. Musical makeover. Musical makeover. The other possibility is that the Spotify had been hacked. The third is just that Spotify had made some very strange filing error, which you would think they would be set up to not do.
But we wanted to investigate, so we wanted to know if you could look into this. That sounds like exactly something I can do. It involves messing around on Spotify, you say? Yes. Yeah, I think I was built for this. Okay, great.
After the break, Kay gets some answers. Welcome back to the show. So a few months after that first conversation with Kay, he texted me and told me he thought he had an answer. We went back to the studio to discuss. Okay, let's go to our story. Where are we? Where are we, PJ? What I recall is that a listener had sent in a question. They went to Cake's Spotify page.
They hit play on what seemed like a surprising... Surprising because Cake is a relatively quiet band. But there's a new Cake song. They hit play. Doesn't really sound like a Cake song. Sounds like Russian rap music. Yeah. By this artist named... Pulya Nevetru. Pulya Nevetru. And the question was kind of like, obviously something is wrong here.
Is it that Pulya Nevetru has gamed the system and hijacked Cake's page? Is it an error? Is it some third stranger option? Is it a very unlikely collaboration? You never know. Maybe a member of Cake is playing almost inaudible guitar on this track. That is the outcome I would most hope for. Secret cake? Secret cake. So you looked into this.
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Chapter 3: What is the role of distributors in music streaming?
Either you have a secret family or there's some sort of fraud. I love my family. But, like, they're doing this kind of, like, it's a combination of you're hoping that the distributors do some of the moderation work for you, and they're going to do a little bit of, like, this looks fishy checking. But it's not a wild west, but it's like a... Under-regulated West? Semi-Wild West. Semi-Wild West.
So, okay, just to recap, individuals are not uploading their own tracks. Tracks are uploaded by distributors. Spotify is doing some work to algorithmically prevent tracks from being attached to the wrong artist? Yeah, but there end up being mistakes, inevitably, and when there are mistakes, Spotify has to go in manually and correct them.
These things are easy to fix individually.
Mm-hmm.
So as soon as it happens, people will begin complaining, and those complaints will eventually irritate somebody enough to spend the 30 seconds it takes to move that supposed cake song onto cake number 93.
So Glenn's saying that, yeah, inevitably there end up being mistakes. Smaller artists get labeled as if they were bigger artists, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the smaller artist is trying to do something sneaky. Yeah. However, it's also possible that it could be strategic. PJ, do you know what Taylor Swift's first ever single was? No. It was a country song called Tim McGraw.
Oh, really?
Yes. And it was about people who fell in love, and she's saying, when you hear Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me.
I hope you think of me.
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Chapter 4: How does Spotify manage artist identification?
Chapter 5: What theories explain the Cake and Pulya Nevetru situation?
Is it a very unlikely collaboration? You never know. Maybe a member of Cake is playing almost inaudible guitar on this track. That is the outcome I would most hope for. Secret cake? Secret cake. So you looked into this.
Yes. What did you find? Okay, so the first thing we did, we wrote to the American band Cake. We emailed their manager who confirmed that, yeah, he had received some questions and complaints from American Cake fans. He said this was not a real collaboration. Which we expected. So instead, we decided to look at the Spotify side of this. We talked to a guy who actually used to work at Spotify.
Hi, Glenn. Hello. How are you? Can I start by just having you say your name and to level set, what's the last song you listened to on purpose?
My name is Glenn McDonald, and the last song I listened to is a fantastic cover of the new model army song Vengeance by the gothic metal band Crippled Black Phoenix. It's really good.
This is one of many things I learned from your book is that you love goth metal covers of popular songs.
I do indeed.
Okay. And so Glenn, like me, is like a real music nerd. I would argue he's more of a music nerd than I am, and I don't say that lightly. I've never heard you say that about anybody.
So like literally when you were like sort of the handshake that people that don't do sports do, which is like, what do you listen to? Where'd you find that? Oh, I like this. Like when you were doing that with him, he knew bands you didn't know?
Yeah. He knew like genres I didn't know. Really? Glenn tried to build a map of all the music genres in the world, which involved coming up with new names for new genres based on clusters of listeners that he was finding. And he's analyzing the waveform of the song, but he's also building like a multidimensional social map to see like, oh, people who like this thing also like this thing.
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Chapter 6: Is this a case of a hack or a mistake?
But also. But also. He's very popular. He's very popular. She's a new artist. And so when people search Tim McGraw... Yeah, and not even just in certain searching, in terms of she's associating herself with Tim McGraw. It goes back even before the digital era. In 1964, there was a group called The Carefrees who made it to number 39 on the pop chart with a song called We Love You, Beatles.
We love you!
Which was an attempt to cash in on Beatlemania.
Yeah, and it's funny, when people do stuff like that, like when you say Taylor Swift's first single was a song called Tim McGraw, the phrase that sort of sings into my mind unbidden is, oh, Taylor Swift's good at the internet? And a lot of people who are cultural workers, cultural artists, who make stuff that goes online, which is many different types of people,
one of the things that I find myself noticing, admiring, or critiquing is just how good are they at the internet? But this point about the carefree is, no, it's really just being good about attention.
It's understanding that there's something people are already paying attention to, and if you align with this, diss this, get near this, you may be able to refract some of that attention and use it yourself.
Yes, exactly right. But I think you're right, PJ, in that the modern era where people are listening to music by, like, typing out the name online has actually led to more of this. There's a Dutch producer, Sam Felt, and he had a big hit in 2019 called Post Malone. Do you think that annoys Post Malone? Well, that's a good question. One answer to that can be found.
Last year, there was a singer called Jordan Adetunji who had a huge record called Kalani, which is the name of an R&B singer. Yeah. Apparently, she was not annoyed because she hopped on the remix.
You can't be too proud to get some of the attention. One of my favorite examples of this was, you're familiar with the punk band Jawbreaker? Yes. There was a short-lived band called Jawbreaker Reunion.
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Chapter 7: What insights did Glenn McDonald share about the music industry?
So we had to voyage into the Russian internet, into VKontakte, and Garrett and a researcher found Pulya Nevetru, who turns out to be a Russian guy, and also found a friend of his that he sometimes works with who seems to be known as Cake. I see. Two guys in Russia that love hip-hop.
Do they make music together? Yes, they do. Okay, this is starting to point in a different direction. And so, when you say found, like, found social media profiles of? Yeah, in fact, I have Cake's Instagram profile right here. Okay. Here, I just sent it to you. Okay.
Cake Tortic. His real name is Sergei. Sergei Savalev. The first picture I see... Okay, so the first picture I see, it's like a Russian dude. He's got like a thin mustache and a beard and what looks like long hair under a hoodie. And he's standing in this like bucolic scene outside of... Are these rams or yaks? I don't know. I was like, is that an alpaca?
They're furry animals with big long horns on them. And then the music company is Kendrick Lamar Pride. And the caption is, I can't fake humble just because your ass is insecure. Which is a Kendrick Lamar quote. I assume so. There's just something so funny about, like,
I don't know, American rap reaching someone kind of dressed in a slightly like American rap-inflected style in a place that is so foreign. In my head, I might be wrong, but I'm like, it's a Russian yak farm. But the message is transmitting and being received. Like there's something that brings me an adrenaline shot of happiness to my heart from that.
Well, yeah, and it's partly what we've been talking about, which is our weird connectivity, where Kendrick Lamar doesn't know that his song is necessarily going to reach this guy, Cake, in Russia, and certainly Cake doesn't know that his song is going to reach us here in New York.
Yeah, and it's the dream of everybody that they'll reach a lot of people, but they don't think about what a lot of people means. Right. Like a lot of people means like the guy at the yak farm. And the thing about this kind of connectivity is it's not just that we could see his Instagram page. We can maybe actually talk to him. Hi, Cake. Good to meet you. Hi. Yeah, me too.
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Chapter 8: How do listeners react to unexpected music on streaming platforms?
Thanks so much for talking with us. I asked Garrett if English was okay, but it sounds like English is great. I think, yeah. I don't speak any Russian, so that's good. So yeah, we got him on a video call. What did the Russian cake have to say for himself? Well, we talked about music, of course. Tell me, when you were growing up, were you listening to a lot of Russian hip-hop?
Were you listening to American hip-hop? What kind of music was influential to you?
All my life, I listened to American music because when I was, I don't know, six years old, maybe seven, my father... said to me that, yo, Russian music is not so good, but you can listen to American music. And he gave me some CDs with Nirvana songs. Nirvana? Yeah, and all my childhood I listened to Kurt Cobain, so I love him very much.
I love ACDC also, but when I grow up, like I'm 15 years old or something like that, I start listening to... Kendrick, Travis, Kanye. So, yeah, I listen to a lot of American hip-hop. Okay. I wondered probably what you're wondering, right? Which is, like, the name Cake. Does that come from the 2006 Lloyd Banks featuring 50 Cent track, Cake?
Money, money, money, cake.
And? No, no it doesn't. It comes more from him being a kid who liked cakes. It's a really strange story. In my childhood a lot of people called me like just brownie. I don't know why, but it's a fact. One day I just eat in a restaurant in a small Russian town named Gilets.
uh the cafe named london so um in the menu i see like cake brownie oh it sounds cool but it's too long i will take just cake and so that's how i become cake So that is how Sergei got his nickname. And the members of the American band Cake might be kind of heartbroken to discover that the Russian rapper Cake had never heard of them.
I feel like if I were them, it would like slightly wound me. Like not even once, not even one time. But you know what? Having talked to teenagers about music, rock music does not exist to them. It's like trying to get them into disco. It's like totally, they're not interested in anything that has a guitar.
So, Sergei told us that he got a laptop from his parents for his 18th birthday, and he started messing around on the computer making hip-hop tracks and decides to collaborate with this kid he met at school, who's also 18, and his name is Ivan, or as he's known on the internet, Pulya Navetru. Ah. Can I show you a Pulya Navetru video on TikTok? Please.
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