The full extent of this heist soon became clear. “Pop Song” by Bad Dog had become “With Me Tonight” by someone named Kyro Schellen. “The Misfit” had become “Outlier” by Arend Grootveld. “Verona” had become “I Told You” by Ferdinand Eising. And so on. Same music, different track names and credited to different artists, none of whom had any other songs or any profile on the web.
It got weirder. Disc Makers, the CD production company hired by the band, was about to start pressing copies of the album and, as part of its routine due diligence, ran the metadata of the songs — their digital fingerprints, essentially — through a program designed to determine if they were originals. They were not, the program reported. Whoever had pirated the tracks had commandeered their digital fingerprints, too.