TL;DR
Nobody in the music distribution chain verifies identity, so anyone paying a few dollars a month can hijack a real band's page, post AI songs under their name, and pocket the royalties.
In September, a new single appeared on the verified Spotify page of the Brooklyn punk band Lathe of Heaven. Any longtime fan could hear something was off: the vocals were not Gage Allison's, and the cover art looked nothing like the band's.
The band did not write it. A journalist made it with AI. He typed one prompt into the AI music generator Udio, and the track showed up on the band's Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and Amazon Music pages at once, without the band knowing.
Where the hole is
Musicians do not upload to every platform themselves. They hand a song to a digital distributor, which sends it everywhere. Convenient, and convenient to abuse.
The journalist paid $3.75 a month for a Distrokid account and typed Lathe of Heaven into the artist name field. The system automatically found the real band's pages and asked whether this was his band.
Then he ticked two boxes: one saying he recorded the music and had the right to sell it worldwide and collect all royalties, another saying he was not using another artist's name without permission.
Neither side verified a single answer. The song went live the next day.
Who gets hit
The targets are mostly small acts, or dead ones. Colleagues of the journalist have found more than 300 AI songs impersonating real people, from Taylor Swift to minor Broadway performers to dead jazz musicians. Some album covers for dead Black jazz artists show a white, AI-generated performer.
Spotify says pages nobody actively manages are especially vulnerable, and it now offers a tool letting artists approve releases before they appear, though artists have to opt in.
The platforms plead scale: Deezer says it handles over 100,000 new tracks a day and reviews them by hand, and Spotify admits the whole industry still lacks a reliable way to detect AI music.
Last year a Ukrainian musician made a track using only her voice and Ableton's built-in instruments, and her distributor refused to release it because a detector called it AI-generated.
In one line: nobody in this chain will answer for whether what you are hearing is really the artist, and the people with the least leverage pay for it.
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