Authentic Live, Verified
How It Works
Anti-cheat mechanism:
Genutune provides a remote, anti-cheat audition portal that detects any cheating/emulation attempts. It requires 2 relatively new smartphones with decent cameras + sensors, and uses layered, independent signals to assess liveness and integrity. When those signals don't line up, the session fails and the artist is banned from ever trying again. All takes are encrypted in real-time and recorded directly to the cloud storage; nothing is saved on the user's device. I will not disclose further details on how the software works, mainly because it's proprietary, and I also don't want to hand smart people a playbook for cracking it.
Each artist's identity and ownership of their Spotify page is verified before accessing the audition portal. Cheating attempts may carry consequences under the terms and conditions. I still need to discuss this further with a lawyer, but the idea is to make such attempts costlier than simply failing and trying again. Right now, the only way to cheat is to hack us (please don't!), access, decrypt, and manipulate the files and encrypt it back without leaving a trace.
If the audition portal detects a cheating attempt, and a human agent verifies it, we may permanently ban the artist and publicly disclose their cheating; the artist waives any defamation claims related to that by accepting the terms and conditions. The artist agrees not to use fakery in releases or live performances, after receiving the Authentic badge; if it's established that they did, they will likewise be banned and publicly named.
Certification process:
Auditions are remote, from the artist's own space. Five songs are randomly selected from their top 10 on Spotify; the artist may record up to three takes per song and submit the take of their choice.
If the submission passes our anti-cheat filter, it's forwarded to a panel of trusted music coaches, who will review and compare the performance with the original release. They will give it a pass, if there's (not 100%, but) a decent match. You don't need to be the greatest musician to pass—you just need to be genuine and able to deliver what you release. Then the artist receives a digital "Authentic" badge, valid for two years. After that, the badge API greys out and requires going through the certification process again.
The vision is to ultimately create a decentralized, community-based certification system where it's musicians themselves who peer-review each other. For example, each artist is assigned to 10 random, previously certified, musicians from the same genre, and they collectively decide if the auditioner is genuine and can deliver what they release.