fakemink Archive, backfromparadise and 'Playuncle Farti': Inside Spotify's Burner-Account Boom

Future GrailfakeminkHip-Hop · Essex, EnglandArtist profile →

The song Dazed calls the biggest U.K. rap single of 2026 has a second life on Spotify, under a name you won't see on any poster. A slowed-down edit of Pixy's “Legacy,” credited to an artist called backfromparadise, has passed 40 million streams. The account stops short of saying who runs it. It drops hints instead: its bio links to a Pixy finsta with the same name, and every upload is a slowed version of one of her songs, with Pixy listed as the featured artist.

Welcome to the Spotify burner account, the underground's newest piece of lore and its newest grey market. In an Oct. 2 feature, Dazed's Solomon PM mapped a whole ecosystem of alt profiles. Some are likely run by the artists themselves, some by fans saving songs the artists deleted, and some, Dazed suggests, by uploaders feeding leaks to fans and collecting royalties on them.

Read more2hollis’ Pirouette: Release Date, Tracklist, Cover Art and Everything We Know

The audiences are real. When Dazed counted, fakemink archive had 980,000 monthly listeners, Lex Amarni's Lex_offline had 500,000 and Yukan Archive had 98,000. Those profiles sit in the same search results as the official catalog, which is why they matter: to a casual listener, a burner can look like just another corner of the discography.

Why would an artist need a burner?

Because lore is the product. Kendrick Lamar has a secret finsta, @jojoruski. Lorde has @onionringsworldwide, which exists to rate onion rings. Part of EsDeeKid's appeal last year was the mystery: fans didn't know his face or his old aliases, and whole online communities went looking. A second Spotify profile is the streaming-era version of the same trick: a place to put the music that doesn't fit the official story.

Lex Amarni didn't bother with hints. Asked about Lex_offline, he hesitated, then told Dazed the account was his.

It’s just somewhere to put throwaway [tracks] that I don’t want on my main account. I’m a perfectionist, so if something [on my profile] doesn’t look right, it hurts me.

Lex Amarni, Dazed

He also keeps two secret SoundCloud aliases, one for sad songs and one for his “advanced electronic” experiments. “They get no views but I don’t care,” he said, calling them “a way to get junk off my laptop.”

Yukan, a rapper from the U.K. underground scene fans shorten to UK Ug, tells a version with a twist. “There was a song, ‘SOS’, that my fans wanted very badly and I didn’t want to upload it myself,” he told Dazed over Instagram. “So, my close friend, Dean, did it instead.” Dazed notes, drily, that Yukan's biggest song is called “Fake ID,” so Dean's existence is open to question.

Then there's fakemink, who recorded as 9090gate until he changed his name in April 2024. His ownership of fakemink archive isn't confirmed, but Dazed counts it among the profiles likely run by artists, and like the others it is stocked with leaks, deleted tracks and alternate versions. For scale, Spotify data that Dazed published in March put his main profile at 8.8 million monthly listeners on Jan. 29, the day his EP The Boy Who Cried Terrified came out, with his global audience up 3,830% in a year and the U.S. now his biggest. The official story continued in May with Terrified, a 19-track album.

TerrifiedfakeminkListen on Apple Music

Who runs the fan archives?

Further down the iceberg sit thousands of fan-run accounts with names like Playuncle Farti, Drain Gang Archive and adixu's stuff, each with streams in the millions, according to Dazed. These don't hint at a link to the artist. They try to stay invisible, tweaking audio, inventing aliases and retitling songs so Spotify's automatic copyright detection doesn't pull their uploads of leaked rap and EDM. Dazed offers a tell for spotting the difference: an artist's own burner rarely loses its uploads.

Plenty of archivists see themselves as preservationists. DecayedWitches, who uploads 2hollis and Novagang demos, put the motive simply: “They kept deleting gems, songs that I loved.” Another, Opium uploader Joe Worker, told Dazed they simply enjoyed the “clout” of giving fans what they wanted. (Opium is Playboi Carti's label, home to Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely. Drain Gang is the collective Bladee formed in 2013.)

Where does it cross the line?

At the far end, the accounts look less like fandom and more like a business. Dazed says accounts like Playuncle Farti and adixu's stuff seem to have seedier intentions: many of these “artists” built paper trails of fake management companies and bios to claim their uploads, and weren't keen to talk. Dazed's read is that they use throwaway profiles to supply leaked Opium music and, presumably, skim Spotify royalties along the way. Leaks can also backfire on the people who made them: in rare cases, Dazed notes, the original artist can be flagged for copyrighted material when they finally try to release the finished song.

Not every artist objects. Last year, Ken Carson posted an Instagram story featuring music from Playuncle Farti, according to Dazed.

It's an old fight on a new platform. In 2019, five leaked songs appeared on Playboi Carti's official Apple Music page without his authorization, and a leaked collaboration with Young Nudy, “Kid Cudi/Pissy Pamper,” reached No. 1 on Spotify's U.S. Viral 50 before it was removed, Complex reported at the time. The fan who said they uploaded it told Complex that DistroKid “didn't detect for copyrights when uploading.” Carti's reply came on his Instagram Story.

Hacked :( I haven't released anything :/ I hate leaks.

Playboi Carti, in 2019, Complex

What does Spotify say?

Asked by Dazed about fan archive accounts, Spotify said it reviews copyright claims from rights holders and takes action, which can mean removing the reported content. It added a warning.

We also have a repeat infringer policy, meaning accounts responsible for multiple violations may be terminated.

Spotify, in a statement, Dazed

That is a takedown system, and it moves when a rights holder files a claim. Spotify's bigger policy push has been aimed elsewhere. Last September it announced stricter impersonation rules, more resources for its “content mismatch” process for music delivered to the wrong artist's profile, and a spam filter for mass uploads and similar tactics. It also said it had removed more than 75 million “spammy tracks” in the previous 12 months. Little of that is aimed at an artist quietly running a second profile of their own songs. (For the week's other fights over what's real on streaming, from AI vocals to bot farms, see our explainer.)

Why does it keep growing?

Dazed's answer is generational: most of these artists were online fans first. Lex Amarni became a producer by his early teens partly by hunting down deep-cut Aphex Twin and Jack Ü records. The American EDM-pop artist underscores ran a YouTube fan account, 2ndgenbias, analyzing the K-pop that shaped her maximalist sound. DecayedWitches has since used the following they built as an archivist to start their own music career.

So the burner sits somewhere between a vault, a mixtape and a fan club, and the scene polices it mostly by etiquette. For more of the artists whose archives are worth digging through, start with our underground list. DecayedWitches summed up the unwritten rule when describing the Novagang members who reached out.

It was more of a ‘love what you’re doing’ type thing and respect to one another. Just be cool about it, if they ask you to take it down, take it down.

DecayedWitches, archivist, Dazed

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 11, 2026.