Someone has figured out how to steal a musician’s identity, publish garbage AI audio under their name, and get paid for it. And neither Spotify, Apple Music, nor the distribution services letting this happen have stopped it. As reported by Engadget, bad actors are exploiting a loophole in music distribution to insert fake, AI-generated tracks directly onto real artists’ catalog pages across major streaming platforms.
The mechanics are embarrassingly simple. A scammer generates a song using tools like Suno or Udio, creates an AI-generated album cover, signs up for a distribution service like DistroKid, checks a box claiming to be the real artist, and uploads the track. That’s it. The song then appears on Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, and Amazon Music as a legitimate new release from that artist. No verification. No human review. The royalties go to the scammer, not the musician whose name is being used.
404 Media confirmed this by testing the process with the Brooklyn band Lathe of Heaven. The fake track went live without any platform catching it. The band’s vocalist put it plainly: the ability to put out work that is distinctly your own is one of the last reasons to make music at all. Having a stranger drop AI slop under your name and collect money from it is not a minor inconvenience. It is a direct attack on a musician’s reputation and livelihood.
Smaller and independent artists are the most exposed here, because they rarely have the teams or resources to monitor their own profiles for fraudulent uploads. Dead artists are also being targeted, which says something about how predatory this scheme actually is. Spotify acknowledged to 404 Media that profiles without active management are especially vulnerable. That’s a careful way of saying the platform has no real system to protect artists who aren’t watching their own backs.
The group Odette Child has been tracking this since July and has already found over 300 fake AI songs impersonating acts ranging from Taylor Swift to deceased jazz musicians. This loophole predates the AI wave, but scale is the new problem. An individual uploading one fake song is a nuisance. Someone generating and uploading hundreds of AI tracks a day is a systemic failure. Around 50,000 AI-generated songs are estimated to hit Spotify every single day.
Spotify says it has a tool in development that would let artists review releases before they go live on their profiles. But that feature has been in limited beta since March. The platform also has a new verification badge for non-AI content and a spam filter targeting mass uploads and duplicates. Amazon Music offered the usual corporate language about detection technologies and monitoring systems. Neither response inspires confidence.
What this situation actually shows is that the distribution layer, the services sitting between creators and streaming platforms, has almost no real accountability built in. Platforms like Spotify are downstream of the problem and are treating it that way. Until distribution services verify who is actually uploading music, and until streaming platforms build real pre-publication review into their pipelines, artists’ profile pages remain open for anyone willing to lie in a checkbox.