The Russian Cake Switcheroo

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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 competitive.

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.

Are you

a 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 California 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 gonna 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.

How do you 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 Chick.

A guy who played in Chick Chick Chick, I think had played with cake and then actually later ended up playing with L C D sound system.

There was 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 contain knowledge.

And when you talk about music in this way, I feel like I'm talking to a London cabby 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 kids' birthdays?

Okay, are you familiar with the hip-hop artist, and I may mispronounce this, Poljanevetru?

No.

Russian hip-hop.

I don't know how well you know Russian.

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 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'd 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.

What do you hear?

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-hop.

Oh, Russian hip-hop, excuse me.

So I don't know how it fits into the Russian hip-hop landscape.

You had 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'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 is 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 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, Polya 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'd 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?

Yeah, I think I was built for this.

Okay, great.

After the break, Kay gets some answers.

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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 by this artist named Pulya Nevetru.

Pulya Nivetru.

And the question was kind of like, obviously something is wrong here.

Is it that Polya Nvetru has gamed the system and like 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?

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?

Could 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 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?

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 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 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, but 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 not 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 sounding 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.

Oh, 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 Puliana Vetru featuring cake.

So there we have it.

Puglia Navetru 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 Puglia Navetru.

Is this an honest mistake?

So

the way you probably imagine 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 Cake's page that it 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 it 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 would look at the week's upcoming releases and look at patterns of, oh, that's funny.

And Take 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 WAV file of this audio recording doesn't actually look like the way a WAV 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 semi-either you have a secret family or there's some sort of fraud.

I love my family.

But like they're, 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, it's not a wild west, but it's like a underregulated 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.

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 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 news.

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.

He's very popular.

She's a new artist.

And so when people search Tim McGraw.

Yeah, and even not even just in terms of of 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.

We love you, Beatles.

Oh, yes, we do.

We love you, Beatles, and we'll be true.

When you're not neat to us, we'll prove.

Oh, beetles.

We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 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, diss this, like get near this, you might 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.

Do you think that 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 Atatunji 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.

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.

Yes.

Because Jawbreaker had broken up.

Yes.

People were wondering if there'd be a Jawbreaker 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 catfished 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 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 Pulja Nivetru and the Russians, I think Bijay, you and I talk offline often.

Yes.

And something that people should know is that when we talk offline, we usually 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.

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.

Maybe it's a scam.

You're totally right.

It's weird.

I like hadn't noticed it in myself.

But yes, I am more 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 investigate some Russians.

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Welcome back to the show.

So Kalava 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 contact,

and Garrett and a researcher found Pulya Navetru, 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 sent it to you.

Okay.

Cake

Tortic.

His real name is Sergei.

Sergei Savalov.

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 ecolic 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 accompanying it is Kendrick Lamar Pride.

And the caption is, I can't fake humble just because your ass is insecure.

It just.

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 like, it's partly what we've been talking about, which is our weird connectivity where like Kendrick Lamar doesn't know 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?

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 Kutzka Bain, 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 Banks featuring 50 Cent track 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 town named Ilets,

the coffin 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 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 Puglya Navetru video on TikTok, please?

Okay.

How would you describe what you're seeing?

A very, very young-looking teenager.

Like, he looks.

I don't know if he's going to listen, but he looks because he's like 15.

He's got a black t-shirt and kind of Mark Zuckerberg gold chain.

Clean cot.

And then this, I think

they go to his collaborator.

Is that cake?

I think that's cake.

I recognize him from the Yak farm.

But they're just like rapping in a 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.

When it comes to Russian cake, you are one of America's leading experts.

Is this what it feels like to be you?

Only on very good days, PJ.

Anyway, Pulian Vetru 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.

And 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 liked 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 reached 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.

You're streaming content into a country that has that kind of a censorship law.

I see.

Their fear is like this 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 may 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 I don't know if you're familiar with that hadn't seen

so yes if you're Spotify yes the idea of are you gonna 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 Boulia Nivetru.

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 this off our 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 Cake's 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.

Yeah.

Nice four-letter word.

There's something.

It's an appealing word, so it's not that shocking that there are a lot of them.

You need to be like Cake182 at this point.

Exactly right.

And so, yes, this guy known as Cake that I talked to, he was like, Yeah, it was a kind of a pain.

It's cool to him that some people heard this song.

Yeah, I think a lot of listeners find me by this group because,

like, I'm not popular, I'm like, no name, but Bye Buy 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 monetize.

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 Venn diagram into the next of people who are like, I want to start listening to rap from Russia.

Right.

But have they picked up some fans from this?

Like, have you?

You know what?

It really actually got them is a full episode on one of America's most beloved podcasts.

God, if 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.

Kyle Visane, he's a writer for the New Yorker.

You can check out the song Bye-Bye by Polyedna 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, P.J.

Vote, and Shruthi Pinamaneni and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Fact-checking by Mary Mathis.

Thanks, Mary.

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Our executive producer is Leah Rhys-Dennis.

Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt.

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