Liz Harris on Helen's 'Linda's Head' & Streaming Scams — SkimNews
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- Helen, the dream-pop trio featuring Liz Harris with drummer Jed Bindeman and bassist Scott Simmons, released their second album Linda's Head, following their 2015 debut The Original Faces; Harris called the collaborative process "really restorative" during a period of medical difficulties.
- Harris played two sold-out nights at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan in mid-September, her first major tour in five years since her 2020 solo album Shade.
- Harris's 2008 track Poison Tree — which she never personally uploaded to digital platforms — was fraudulently registered by a scammer who earned around six figures in payouts, until Harris and Kranky label chief Brian Foote shut down the operation; the song has since accrued over 300 million streams.
- Harris warned that streaming platforms are far less regulated than listeners assume, describing a constant "whack-a-mole" effort to remove fake remixes and infringing uploads by bad actors skimming royalties from independent artists.
- Harris recounted her upbringing from age two in a Sonoma County commune called the Group that followed Gurdjieff's teachings and shuffled children between households; she called it exploitative but formative, and noted the cult's name directly inspired her project Grouper.
- Harris framed the songs on Linda's Head as grappling with "ecstatic nihilism" amid what she called "the war on Gaza and straight-up fascism in this country," contrasting the urge to escape with a need to remain present in community.
Why it matters: Harris's case shows the concrete financial toll of streaming fraud on independent artists: she lost around six figures to a single scammer before her label reclaimed what was owed. Her warnings about unregulated platforms expose how indie musicians absorb the costs of an enforcement system that fails to protect them, even when their own distributor is the fraudster's channel.
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