Search Engine - The Russian Cake Switcheroo

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

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

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Check, check, check, check. All right. Are we doing an intro? I don't have an intro. No, I'm just, I can say, okay. 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, Pige, is it can be kind of competitive. It can be very competitive. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but that kind of competition can call. 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, Caliphatea 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 do you describe their music? Sprightly 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 a short skirt long jacket. Is that correct? Yeah. with a short skirt and a long jacket. I remember in the early 2000s,

I think there was crossover with this Brooklyn band called Chick-Chick-Chic-Chic. A guy who played in Chick-Chic-Chic, I think had played with cake, and then actually later ended up playing with LCD sound system. There was a saying before GPS was wide-spread 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 contain knowledge. And when you talk about music in this way, I feel like I'm talking to a London caveat in 1997. Isn't it possible that brains don't actually expand and that it's zero-sum? That you're deleting a lot of stuff. Yeah, that you'd be horrified by all the stuff that's not in my brain.

Your kid's birthday? Okay, are you familiar with the hip-hop artist, and I may mispronounce this, Polianavetru? No. Russian hip hop. I don't know how well you know Russian hip-hop. No, you could be making this up

just to trick me and get me to say like, oh, yeah, first album's great. And then it turns out it's fake. No, no, no, real band, real, not an entirely popular group, but a group that does perform music. I have a certain linguistic prejudice when it comes to hip-hop, so my knowledge of non-anglophone hip-hop

is almost non-existent. Have you listened to any German hip-hop? Not voluntarily. better than you think anyway our listener is a cake fan and cake he knew had not put out a new record in years so he got excited when he saw this notification

saying there's a new cake song out and also that it's a collaboration with this little known Russian hip-hop artist I just want to play this song it's called bye bye I'm sure you guys I'm sure you're supposed to I'm going to give me

all I'm all this night What are you here? I hear a flow that reminds me a little bit of bone thugs in harmony. The 808 kicks and some production that sounds a little bit like chronic era, like West Coast hip-hop, right? It has those zap-derived synthesizers, maybe. What else do you hear? Like I said, I haven't really listened to much German hip-hop, so I don't know... Russian hip-hip-hop.

Oh, Russian hip-hop, excuse me. So I don't know how it fits into the Russian hip-hop landscape. You have not pointed out that you hear a lot of Cake's influence in this collaboration. No, no. If you had not mentioned Cake and you had 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 uncake-like song, and our listener was not the only person wondering about this.

Kate, 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 are 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, Plia Net Vitru? 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 the third version 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, It's 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, yes.

Yeah, I think I was built for this. Okay, great. After the break, Kay gets some answers. It never happens at a good time. The pipe bursts at midnight. The heater quits on the coldest night. Suddenly, you're overwhelmed. That's when HomeServe is here.

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I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Corey Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walts, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 sent it in question, they went to Cake Spotify page, they hit play on what seemed like 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 by this artist name, Pulianavetru. Pulyanavetru. And the question was kind of like, obviously something is wrong here.

Is it that Pollyan Vetru has gamed the system and, like, hijacked Kake's page? Right. Is it an error? Is it some third stranger option? Is it a very unlikely collaboration? You never know. Maybe a member of Kake 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'd listen to on? purpose. My name is Glenn MacDonald, 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 do you find that? Oh, I like this.

Like, when you were doing that with him, he knew bands you didn't know? 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 would. was finding, and he's analyzing the wave form of the song, but he's also building like a multi-dimensional social map to see, like, oh, people who like this thing also like this thing, here's how far this genre is from that genre.

Okay. Glenn doesn't work at Spotify anymore, but he used to be one of the lead engineers there, and when he was there, he had access to all kinds of data and information, and he also had his hands on all the different levers trying to make Spotify better at record. recommending new music for its users. You know, most people, most of the time, want to hear the stuff they like. I think of listening in these three concentric circles.

And the middle circle is my stuff. Most of the time I listen to my stuff. And then the second circle is, I've become slightly bored with what I know of my stuff, and I want more of my stuff. Not radically different stuff, just like new albums by the same bands, new bands in the same genres,

just like some new songs. that they're the kind of songs that I already like. And then the third circle is, I want to discover something new. I want to see what else there is in the world. The problem is if you encounter unexpected things when you think you're being given things that you already like, they sound like errors.

Right. And so part of what Spotify does is it tries to show people new music that they might like that's different from music they're listening to, but not too different, otherwise they're going to be unhappy and maybe turn off the app. And so the search engine listener who wanted to hear cake and ended up hearing Russian rap had like the bad version of the Spotify experience. This is what's not supposed to happen on Spotify, as you hear something that sounds like it has

no relationship to the thing you actually wanted to hear. So I thought Glenn might be able to explain how this could possibly happen. So I actually read him the question from our listener. So we here at Search Engine International Corporate Headquarters got an email from a listener who understands that when we say no question too small, we really mean it. Can I read it to you? Yeah.

All right. So here's the email. I went to listen to the band Cake, and they had a new song on Spotify. Their first release in like 20 years or so. And it was actually maybe 13 years or something. And it was the least cake sound. song ever. It sounds like Russian rap and bad Russian rap. You know what they say. Everyone's a critic, right? Yeah.

The band they apparently collaborated with is Pulya Navetru. I think they, cake, may have been hacked. But how can that happen? Wouldn't this be an easy fix? So confused. Ah, this is a great question. And so here's what cake sounds like. Reluctantly crouched at the starting line. Engines pumping and thumping in time. The green light flashes, the flags go up. Churning and burning, they yearn for the cup. They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank.

Fuel burning fast on an empty tank. Reckless and wild. And then here is Pugianavetru featuring cake. So there we have it, Pulyanavetru featuring cake. That track has about 76,000 listeners, which is less than anything from the last cake album, but more than anything else from Pulya Vetru. Is this an honest mistake? So the way you probably imagine the streaming music business works,

if you are not in the streaming music business, but you have done other things online, is that artists upload things to Spotify like you would upload your wedding video to YouTube. And thus, if something is on cakes page that probably isn't cake, they must have been hacked. And the amazing truth is the system that the whole music business runs on

is like orders of magnitude less sophisticated than that. So Glenn explained that Spotify doesn't work the way YouTube works. YouTube, you can put whatever you want on there, but Spotify, you, PJ, can't just record a song, or in your case, a rap, and upload it to Spotify. Generally, you need a middleman. You need what's called a distributor. Everything gets to streaming services via distributors,

and those distributors send giant bulk files, audio with XML metadata, and artists can be identified with unique IDs, but don't have to be, and thus, especially from Mindy distributors, are often just referred to by name. So Spotify probably gets a thousand files a day that have names, that just say the artist's name is cake or just like a thousand short common word names and then has to figure out okay of all the artists named cake of which there are probably a hundred which one is this but he said that even with this middleman system which greatly limits the amount of content that's uploaded to Spotify it still isn't feasible to like review every song before it gets uploaded

there's still like way too much stuff got it And so there's a giant trust system that controls all of this and is trivially abused or accidentally abused. And so when I was still at Spotify, I spent quite a bit of energy that I honestly didn't want to spend trying to guard against this, making tools that look at the week's upcoming releases and look at patterns of, oh, that's funny. I mean, cake has never had a release from that distributor before. He even had some tools, including some algorithmic tools, that he could check and be like, oh, the wave file of this audio recording doesn't actually look like the way a wave file of cake would usually look like.

So it's almost algorithmically, or through machine learning, or whatever, doing something similar to how your credit card company is like, oh, it's weird that all of a sudden you're trying to use your Chase card in North Dakota. You've never been there. And you're buying 30 boxes of diapers. you've never bought any baby stuff. Like, we think something's going on.

Like, they're doing a similar... 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... 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? A semi-wild West. Semi-wild West. So, okay, just a recap. Yeah, 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. 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. 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.

When you think happiness, I hope you think that new... 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. But also... But also... He's very popular at the time. He's very popular. She's a new artist. And so when people search Tim McGraw...

Yeah. And not even just insert him 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 Care Freeze, who made it to number 39 on the pop chart with a song called We Love You Beatles. It 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, it's just how good are they at the internet. But this point about the care freeze 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, like, align with this, dis this, like 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. Yeah. There's a Dutch producer, Sam Felt, and he had a big hit in 2019

called Post Malone. You seem to 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 remake.

I like the way your body is. It's that too obvious. Okay. I like your cockiness. Fuck being confident. You bad just like Kalani is. Just like Kenani is. You can't be too proud to get some of the attention.

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. That is so deep. Because Jawbreaker had broken up. Yes.

People were wondering if there'd be a Jobbreaker Reunion. And if you put Jawbreaker Reunion on the flyer, maybe people look twice. They're really, I mean, you're really, it's like posting misleading photos of yourself on a dating site. Like, you will bring people in, but what happens next seems unenjoyable for you, the person who has catfish them.

Well, sure, although as you see from actual dating sites, like if people feel like the alternative is no one looking at their profile at all, maybe, you know, maybe you try to get the foot in the door and you worry about the mix up a little later. But back to our story about this Russian hip-hop artist and whether this particular instance is musical catfishing. I mean, it sounds like there's at least a possibility that this was a kind of attentional hijacking. Yes, and this is a venerable tradition in music. When it comes to Pullianavetru and the Russians, I think, PJ, you and I talk offline often. Yes. And something that people should know is that when we talk offline, we usually pause our conversation every 30 minutes or so to check our privilege. So I thought it would be a good idea to do a privilege check right now.

PJ, where were you born? Haverford, Pennsylvania. Haverford, Pennsylvania, proud American. I was born in Birmingham, England, but at the age of five. I moved to this country and I became a naturalized citizen when I was, I think, 19, just in case anyone from the government is listening. And so we are both Americans. Yeah.

We have some American privilege. And I think it's fair to say that sometimes people in America harbor prejudices about people in Russia. It's true. It's a very acceptable place to harbor prejudices against. And I think part of what's happening with this story is that, like, there's this track uploaded to the Internet. By a Russian, eyebrows raised.

You're totally... Maybe it's a scam. You're totally right. It's weird. I hadn't noticed it in myself. But yes, I am more likely to assume in a situation in which the facts are unclear that a Russian person may be interfering with American due process. A very specific kind of prejudice. Check your privilege, PJ.

Thank you, Kay. We're going to take a short break. When we return, Kay is going to do it. to investigate some Russians. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

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Welcome back to the show. So Calva and the search engine team had spent some time on Russian social media, including this website, VContacta, which is sort of like the Russian version of Facebook. I'm going to let Kay take it from here. So we had to voyage into the Russian internet, into V-Contacta, and Garrett and a researcher found Pulyanavetru, 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. I just send it to you. Okay. Cake Tortick. His real name is Sergei. Sergei Savilev. The first picture I see... Okay.

The first picture you see... It's like a Russian dude. He's got a thin mustache and a beard and what looks like long hair under a hoodie and he's standing in this like Piccolic 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-Kla-R-R-Pride and the caption is, I can't fake humble just because your ass is insecure. Which is a Kendra-Lamark 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-inflicted 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 like, it's partly what we've been talking about,

which is our weird connectivity, where like, Kendrick Lamar doesn't know that his song is necessarily going to reach this guy, Cake, in Russia. Yeah. 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. Thanks so much for talking with us. I asked Garrett if English was okay, but it sounds like English is great. I think, yeah, yeah, 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, where you listening to American hip-hop? What kind of music was influential to you? All my life, I listen 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 American music and he gave me some CDs with Nirvana songs.

Nirvana. Yeah, and all my childhood, I listen to Kudkabein, 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 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 Bank's featuring 50 cent track, Cake. And? No, no it doesn't.

No, we're old. It comes more from him being a kid who like 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 Yelets, the cafe named London. So 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 of heartbroken to discover that the Russian rapper K 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 Nevetru video on TikTok? Please. Okay. How would you describe what you're seeing? A very, very young-looking. He looks...

I don't know if he's going to listen. But he looks like 15. He's got a black... T-shirt and kind of Mark Zuckerberg, Gold Chain, clean cut. And then this, I think they go to his collaborator. Is that cake? I think that's cake. I recognize him from the Yannock Farm.

But they're just like rapping in street somewhere in Russia. But at this point in the story, PJ, it's easier for you to recognize Russian cake than American cake. Isn't that true? If I showed you a picture of a guy and tried to guess which one was the lead singer of American cake, you would have no idea, right? I would have no idea. My mental image...

But when it comes to Russian Keg, you are one of America's leading experts. Is this what it feels like to be you? Only on very good days, PJ. Anyway, Pollynevetru and Cake upload their track. They give it to their distributor. The distributor puts it on Spotify. Yeah. And they see some people are listening to it, which is good, very good, and they're excited,

but then they realize there's a problem. Right. It's linked to this band they've never heard of. So were they like at first they're excited because it's doing numbers and then they're disappointed because it's slightly a glitch? Yeah, I don't think it was like exploding with the numbers. But it was more like, yes, they like the idea that it was getting some exposure, but there was like, you know, we actually are trying to maybe have a career. We got to fix this issue. Okay.

And they reach out to the distributor. Distributor is kind of like, not our problem. You guys need to take it up with Spotify. And there's a problem at that point. Why? Because, I don't know if you recall this, in 2022, there was some international news involving Russia. Yes. So in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Spotify closed its Russian office.

And then shortly afterwards, Russia passes a law that makes it illegal to disparage the Russian military. Okay. And in the aftermath of that, Spotify blocks its service in Russia altogether. Wait, so when Russia made it illegal to disparage the Russian military, Spotify was like, we're standing up for free expression, no Russian can listen to music? Well, I think maybe part of the idea was there might be legal liability. Oh, it's not a... If you're streaming content into a country that has that kind of a censorship law. I see. Their fear is like the same porous system that allows cake the rapper to end up as cake the rocker could mean that some Russian group could put up something called like,

Fuck the generals. And next thing you know, some Spotify executive can't vacation in St. Petersburg. Well, actually, as you met, I don't know if you're aware of this, PJ. Spotify, it's not just music. They're actually involved in the podcast business, too. Oh, really? Yeah, I don't know if you're familiar with that. Hadn't see.

So, yes, if you're Spotify, yes, the idea of, are you going to monitor all your podcasts for anti-Russian military content? So for whatever reason. They jump out of the market. They're like, yeah, we're not operating in Russia. So Russian cake is in this situation where he's trying to fix the mistake. It's proving pretty hard to do because Spotify doesn't officially exist in this country. And so eventually he tracks down a Spotify person in America and tells them, hey, there's this issue.

Yeah. They have to contact someone like Glenn, like Glenn's successor, some of those people that are working there whose job it is to get this all figured out. And so do they try? Yeah, they try and eventually they do it. We actually reached out to Spotify and a spokesperson told us that when the issue was brought to their attention, they, quote, contacted the provider and got it fixed, making sure the song was correctly placed. So, right now, if you're a fan of the American band cake and you go to their Spotify page,

you will no longer see a collaboration track with Pulia Navetru. But so it's so funny, I would assume that this was all, like in my mentalization, the way I imagine this all going down is the American rock band cake was like, yo, you got to get the software page. It was actually the people who were getting more attention than they normally would because it wasn't attention from the fans they were trying to reach. They proactively said, like, hey, our music doesn't belong there. I believe it was actually both.

So I communicated with Cakes Manager who said, like, yeah, this was a big pain in the ass. I see. Okay, so both sides were like, please fix the giant infinite library of music, Spotify. Which is fixable. I think at this point there are, there's a lot of cakes. I believe there are 15 cakes I found with a quick search on Spotify. who all have different artist accounts? That's going to be more and more of a problem.

Well, especially with a name like cake, nice four-letter word. It's an appealing word, so it's not that shocking that there are a lot of them. You need to be like Cake 182 at this point. Exactly right. And so, yes, this guy known as Cake that I talked to, he was like, yeah, it was kind of a pain.

It's cool to him that some people heard this song. Yeah, I think a lot of fleeceania is fine, me by this groove because like I'm not popular I'm like no name but bye-bye is have a lot of streamings for me it's as far as I remember 70,000s yeah or something like that and it was very great for me that it posted on their page so yes this is their big hit but it doesn't seem like it's a big hit that was part of a scam or that they were able to monitor And has it gotten them any, like I imagine the overlap among listeners to the American alt-rock group cake?

Like, there's not that many people in the one circle who would vend diagram into the next to people who are like, I don't want to start listening to rap, but from Russia. Right. But have they picked up some fans from this? You know what it really actually got them is a full episode on one of America's most beloved podcasts. God. This is what blows them up.

Their plan has worked, PJ. Because you and I are sitting here. Just two pawns. Talking about Russian cake. Kalwazana, he's a writer for the New Yorker. You can check out the song Bye Bye by Pollyadna Vetru and Cake, the Russian rapper, not the American rock band. We will have a link to the song in our show notes.

You can also find it on Spotify where it is now properly filed. Kay, you want to read the credits? Sure. Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw productions. It was created by you, PJ Vote, and Shruthy Pinnam-Mennanee, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John,

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