I found a couple of John McLaughlin albums on Qobuz but they don’t appear in his official discography which makes me suspicous.
What are these and where did they come from?
According to Google AI, Badjammer Records, which released these, indicates they are probably AI-generated…
AI Overview
Based on recent reports, Badjammer Records appears to be a label or account associated with the proliferation of AI-generated music, specifically by uploading synthetic content under the names of established, real artists.
As of early 2026, music listed under Badjammer Records is widely considered to be part of the “AI-generated” or fake artist problem on music streaming services.
One of its sources is this Roon post…
Thanks for the info. I’m surprised the real John McLaughlin hasn’t been able to have these things removed.
Using familiar artists names as a cover for AI-generated songs/albums seems to be a common occurrence lately. Some in the community are asking if Roon can provide an AI detector addon to allow us to skip AI tracks/albums here…
Until then, we have to use our own due diligence to detect them like you did with the John McLaughlin releases.
This seems to me like a streaming-service problem rather than a Roon problem. I’ve emailed Qobuz about it, but haven’t heard back. All the streaming services know about these and other examples of AI-generated music. In this case, it’s clearly illegal, but it’s quite complicated otherwise. Some of the AI bands have released very successful records. That means money for the middlemen, so it’s going to happen. There’s also the actual popularity to consider, too. If you accept the premise that Taylor Swift manufactures a pop product and serves/sells it to an audience who is happy with it, we can sneer at the lowbrows, but in the end the relationship works and the customer is happy. Same with McDonalds or Olive Garden. They’re all ersatz in a way. The AI bands are, too, but… They’re delivering what some people want. Is that wrong, or does it just makes some of us queasy? If you’re listening to a radio and a song comes on by a band you don’t know, but you really dig it, what is the actual situation there and how should we think about it?
Claude ai provides the following reasons why streaming services are reluctant to police AI-generated music:
In my opinion, Roon does not have the same incentives to ignore the flood of AI-generated music, which is currently diluting the quality of music streaming on its platform
When randomly streaming songs, it is difficult these days to distinguish between tracks created by humans and those created by AI. Once it is brought to my attention, with a little research, that the track is probably AI-generated, I refuse to support it, regardless of how good it sounds, because the only creative thing about it is the prompt used to produce it from other human music. What incentive do humans have to gain a musical talent and create music in the future if you can make money with a simple AI prompt?
Asking Roon to provide an add-on that skips AI music will avoid rewarding it with stream counts that generate income and an incentive to continue diluting the quality and artistry of music.
Many people make music without having income as the goal. The incentive is the music, the playing with others, the satisfaction that mastery brings… Making it all about cash incentive sounds sort of like the argument that, without X religion and the incentives and disincentives that are built into that structure, how are we supposed to car about being good? It just doesn’t hold up. Music still gets made, and people continue being good regardless.
If you want to talk about incentives, then all you have to do is look at the vanishingly small chance that any musician is going to make noticeable money at all, especially since the entire money-making part of music is geared to the lowest common denominator, which is exactly where the money is. Venues, dates, support, record deals, audience sizes no longer have much to do with the music, and they haven’t for quite a while. As it stands today, if you’re not filling stadiums, your income is from merch, not music sales. And yet, people still make music—now more than ever before.
It’s an interesting situation. In my business, “If it looks good, it is good.” is a truism. You could easily change that to “If it sounds good, it is good.” Is there real value in work? And if nobody knows about that work? Does the value still exist for anyone but the maker? Some people care about that and some don’t, but there is no objective right or wrong. Some people think that the character of the maker has something to do with the value of the music, yet some truly horrid people have made great music. “If I find out that the thing I enjoyed isn’t what I thought it was, then that negates my enjoyment” doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
“Quality and artistry” is a pretty squishy set of words. “When randomly streaming songs, it is difficult these days to distinguish between tracks created by humans and those created by AI.” Well, there goes the “quality” part. As for artistry… Is that a real thing, a perceived thing, a hoped-for or imagined thing?
All of these things are what makes our current circumstances interesting and complex.
And that is why I suggested an On/Off switch in previous discussions on the subject…
…for those that do not care what they’re listening to and the potential ramification(s) longterm.
I find it ironic that people who don’t want to hear AI music because it isn’t “human” have no problem using a non-human AI system to detect it and stop it.
It seems unfair to make Roon do this sort of screening. There are whole companies devoted to making technology which screens for AI, and they haven’t got it right yet.
Searching for information is not an art form like music. It’s a source for information that should be verified by other sources generally referenced in AI’s conclusion.
Why is it unfair for Roon to provide better quality music? Because that’s the nature of their business. Roon gave us numerous quality enhancements that other music players do not (GUI; OPRA; higher res streaming services; data sources; ARC; etc.). All of these examples tend to improve the quality of our listening experience…unless they do not concern you.
Because of the work involved. They present the input sounds as well as they can. They don’t decide that college garage rock is garbage, or that Diana Krall is superduper. Same for AI product. It’s not their responsibility. it’s our responsibility. If we don’t want to hear it, we should make sure we don’t stuff it into Roon in the first place.
And there isn’t any objective way to determine non-technical “better quality” as far as the input source goes.
No, they don’t. They are options, not quality enhancers. They have no effect on what we actually hear.
I’m not sure what this means.
I would agree; it would be nice if TIDAL and Qobuz took advantage of the AI detection services provided by ACRCloud, which they use for other services, according to Claude ai:
The reasons they probably do not use this service are because of the “distributor resistance, legal ambiguity, and revenue conflict” incentives mentioned earlier.
Where does that leave us, the end user, today? We can either hope enough people speak out and unsubscribe to put pressure on the streaming services to implement it, or ask Roon to integrate ACRCloud’s AI detection services, since TIDAL and Qobuz already have a relationship with ACRCloud. Unfortunately, I do not believe unsubscribing will have much effect, since it seems all streaming services are being flooded with AI-generated content. There are no AI-free streaming services to force their hand, unlike the options MQA protestors had to successfully implement change.
Qobuz is a bit more niche than Tidal, so maybe a bunch of us could put effective pressure on them. Spotify is unlikely to get pressure, and is unlikely to care, since their revenues are high and they don’t have to care. They are the default service.
The AI Music Detector is, at the moment, all hype and no numbers. Several of the other services that purport to have good detection results are talking about controlled tests with a limited number of AI generators. In addition, many industry pros are saying that their numbers are inflated. Then there is (for Roon, anyway) the problem that there seem to be only two tiers of AI detection. One is for consumers, and is cheapish to free, kind of the way server software is, and the other is massive enterprise-level detectors, whose owners negotiate contracts in the tens of thousands if not hundreds. The cheap ones are rate/api-hit limited, and the others are out of Roon’s reach, both because Roon can’t affort those numbers, and because the big players just don’t want to mess with smaller companies.
One of other barriers is caring. Most people don’t care about the actual quality (low-bitrate, poorly encoded mp3s v.s. lossless formats, formulaic junk pop v.s. actual creativity and meaning). They also don’t care much where the content comes from or how it’s made. Most young people did not grow up in circumstances that make the value of work/artistry/craftsmanship readily apparent. They grew up with YouTubers who run successful channels with cheap gear and dubious “content”. They know it costs next to nothing to “make music”, they can get all they want incredibly cheaply from Spotify or Apple Music, and that devalues the components of art and art creation even more. I think this is likely to lead to an actual shift in what value means both in the creative arts and in other industries.
There is some interesting “Authenticy” backlash going on; see the rise of vinyl, cassettes, film cameras, etc. Rather hilariously or sadly, depending on your sense of humor about these things, many of the “authentic” products and services have been or are about to be coöpted by corporations who are the antithesis of authentic. (e.g. Analog Vinyl that originates from all-digital creation, mixing and mastering.)
I realize I’ve been quite long-winded here. I’m very interested in these topics, and I think they’re both worth thinking about, and fun, too.
It would have to be through subscriber complaints like you did, since unsubscribing from both would be a hard sell for Roon users, I believe. With MQA, Roon users were mainly unsubscribing from TIDAL because Qobuz did not officially support it and had fewer MQA tracks in its catalog.
Deezer is the only streaming service that claims to have its own AI detection system. But I have found too many AI tracks/albums on their platform to believe they’re having much success. There are many sites you can find online that will scan a song track and analyze it to determine if it’s AI-generated. Some state their source is ACRCloud. And they have been accurate from what I can tell so far.
True, it may turn out to be too costly for Roon to absorb on its own or not cost-effective enough to pass the expense on to its subscribers. But there could be a situation where TIDAL and Qobuz could subscribe to ACRCloud’s AI detection services on a bundled basis and possibly be allowed to offer a commercial asset-sharing arrangement with Roon at a lower cost.
But I believe most Roon subscribers do care, which is an incentive for Roon to provide this AI detection feature if it’s feasible.
MQA wasn’t that big a deal for me personally. I could take it or leave it. However, there were enough concerned folks to make a difference.
While this may be where AI is taking us in the near future, I hope folks will eventually realize what is missing in AI-generated art. For example, some of those young folks who used to not care about music quality have been jumping on the vinyl bandwagon.
Isn’t that more nostalgia for something they never experienced and the sense of “realness” rather than actually caring about the sound? After all, CDs deliver much better sound quality with greater dynamic range than vinyl. I’m not interesting in the perceived quality argument between records and CDs, but there isn’t any argument about the technical quality differences. i could be wrong about the reason; it may be about the very different sound qualities. LPS and CDs are quite differnt sonic experiences.
Personally, I agree. I was never convinced that my cheap turntable produced better sound than CDs. However, I never owned a quality turntable to see if that made it worth the effort to get out of my listening chair to flip sides.
That said, I believe vinyl sounds better than what was coming out of those mp3 players they used to play music on. They are also more in touch with who and how the music was created perusing the album jacket.
Good point.
I’m new to this topic, but is there a database already on line that identifies these albums?