Musicians worldwide are confronting an unsettling new threat as AI-generated tracks are fraudulently uploaded to their official profiles on major streaming services. This deceptive practice, which experts label as a low-barrier scam exploiting digital platforms, is deceiving fans, siphoning royalties, and undermining artistic integrity.
The issue gained prominence in July 2025 when British folk artist Emily Portman was alerted by a fan to a new album, “Orca,” appearing on her Spotify and Apple Music pages. She quickly recognized the songs, with their “pristine perfection” and “vacuous lyrics,” as AI-produced music trained on her previous works. For Portman, the experience was deeply distressing, representing what she called the start of something dystopian.
Similarly, Australian musician Paul Bender, bassist for the Grammy-nominated band Hiatus Kaiyote, discovered four bizarrely bad AI tracks on his side project’s profiles earlier in 2025. He criticized the lax security on distribution platforms, stating that the process of claiming an artist profile and uploading a song made it the easiest scam in the world. His subsequent petition for better safeguards gathered over 24,000 signatures, including support from major artists.
The fraud operates through a simple but effective process. Scammers, often posing as artists, use third-party music distribution services with minimal verification to upload tracks to an artist’s official page. Once live, the primary goal is to harvest royalties. To amplify revenue, bad actors frequently use bots to artificially inflate play counts, turning a trickle of income from low per-stream rates into a meaningful sum.
Facing growing criticism, streaming platforms have begun to implement more robust countermeasures. Spotify, in a late 2025 policy update, acknowledged that AI has accelerated existing problems like spam and deceptive content. Their response includes stronger impersonation policies, new spam filters to stop recommending fraudulent tracks and protect the royalty pool, and support for an industry standard to disclose AI use in music credits.
This fraud wave exists within a massive, rapid expansion of AI-generated content. Advanced tools like Suno and Udio can now produce tracks that most listeners cannot distinguish from human-created music, leading to a flood of new content. This technological shift has also birthed fully AI-generated artists, some achieving notable commercial success, such as the AI band The Velvet Sundown, which garnered one million subscribers on Spotify.
For musicians, the impact transcends financial loss. Artists describe a profound violation, with one noting that music feels like the signature of one’s soul. Emily Portman, who is concurrently funding her authentic new album, emphasizes that true artistry is about human connections and creativity. The legal landscape offers uneven protection, with stronger rights in jurisdictions like California but weaker recourse in places like the United Kingdom, where copyright law is ill-equipped to handle voice imitation.
As the line between human and synthetic artistry blurs, the industry faces urgent questions about verification, copyright, and ethics.
