In late February, the British singer-songwriter Benedict Cork posted a snippet of himself playing a soulful new song called “Something Kinda Strange.” The clip quickly racked up more than 100,000 plays on TikTok, with fans clamoring for the full song.
A few days later, Cork started receiving messages about the song’s release—which was odd, because he hadn’t finished it yet. Eventually, someone sent him the song, which was on streaming platforms under the name Eduardo Arguelles. Not only did this rendition have full instrumentation and backing vocals, but it also had a new second verse and bridge, complete with lyrics that Cork begrudgingly wished he had written—including “Something kinda dangerous in the way you say my name.”
This version of his song had been created with AI. Someone had seen Cork’s snippet, and, trying to capitalize on its virality, ran it through an AI music generator and posted the result in order to generate streams. “At first, I found it really funny. Then I was impressed by how amazing the technology is,” Cork says. “And then I became a little more angry.”
Cork is one of a growing number of musicians facing increased competition or outright theft from AI music generators. In November, the streaming service Deezer said that 50,000 AI-generated tracks are uploaded to its platform every day, accounting for 34% of all new music. Sony Music said in March that it had requested the removal of more than 135,000 AI songs impersonating its artists.
Some musicians contend that AI is helping to democratize the creation of music. And streaming platforms say they are mitigating the downside impacts of AI by implementing tools to crack down on imposters. But many musicians fear the entire industry is nevertheless sliding towards the prioritization of machine-made slop, making it increasingly hard for rising or independent musicians to make a living.
“The technology is amazing and I use it in my day-to-day life,” Cork says. “But we also need to make sure we’re keeping artistry and creativity in a sacred space—otherwise we’re all screwed.”
Slop at Scale
In the past couple years, AI has permeated the music industry in several overlapping but distinct ways. There are musicians who are using AI as a collaborative tool, like Timbaland. There are aspiring songwriters using AI to create musical avatars for themselves, like Telisha Jones’ AI project Xania Monet.
And then there’s the bottom-of-the-barrel slop: scammers using AI not for artistry at all, but to confuse fans into clicking on new songs. Spotify said in September that it had removed over 75 million “spammy tracks” from the platform in the previous 12 months, and stepped up enforcement against AI impersonators.
In particular, scammers have targeted low- or mid-level artists with devout followings, or dormant artists whose return to music might spark particular interest. AI-generated songs, for instance, have been uploaded to the pages of SOPHIE, the electronic music producer who died in 2021, and Uncle Tupelo, the defunct 90s band of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy.
Something similar happened to the British indie folk singer-songwriter Ormella, who has 83,000 monthly Spotify listeners. In January, she released a live EP from her living room—a project that came out of her desire to “do something ungenerated, because I never use AI in my music,” she says.
But ironically, the release was overshadowed when a few days later, an AI song appeared on her Spotify profile. “I had a lot of fans message me, asking, ‘Is it you? It doesn’t sound like you,’” she says.
Many of the third-party services that handle the uploading of new music on streaming platforms, like DistroKid and TuneCore, lack robust authentication processes to prevent impersonation of existing artists. This system enabled someone to upload a song straight to Ormella’s account and notify her superfans of its release, who clicked play.
“I feel like I have enough of an audience that will listen, but not enough of a profile that my accounts are really protected,” she says.
Ormella says that the AI song received a thousand plays on its first day, which would only net the fraudster behind it a few dollars. But the same AI song appeared on another singer-songwriter’s pages, albeit with different titles and cover artwork, Ormella says. It appears that these scammers are uploading the same AI songs to many different artists’ pages, trying to nickel and dime their way to profit.
Combating AI
After months of artists complaining about this problem, Spotify took action on Tuesday, introducing a new optional feature called Artist Profile Protection, which lets artists review releases before they go live on the platform. “Music has been landing on the wrong artist pages across streaming services, and the rise of easy-to-produce AI tracks has made the problem worse,” Spotify wrote in a statement. “That’s not the experience we want artists to have on Spotify, and that’s why we’ve made protecting artist identity a top priority for 2026.”
Ormella says she is happy about this step taken by Spotify. But the problem still exists on other streaming platforms. And Ormella contends that the incursion of AI into music poses many other problems, including AI songs taking the place of those by real artists on popular playlists, and a lack of transparency about what is and isn’t AI-generated. “I hope that it becomes more like: ‘We know this song is AI, and there are real humans with real experiences that AI is stealing,’” she says. “I would prefer it to be penalized rather than uplifted.”
Law enforcement and politicians are taking notice. In March, a North Carolina man pleaded guilty to fraud after he generated hundreds of thousands of AI songs and then used bots to stream those songs billions of times, pocketing more than $8 million in royalty payments. Politicians in both the U.S. and the U.K. also hope to pass new lawsprotecting artists against “synthetic forgeries.”
Benedict Cork was able to get his imitation song removed after a few days. But the incident shook him, and made him think about bigger existential questions. “The fact that it’s coming up with these things now, when we’re only a few years into the AI revolution: what’s it gonna be like in 10 years time?” he asks. “Are any of us going to be writing songs anymore, or are we just gonna leave it to robots?”
The post AI Slop Is Flooding Streaming—and Musicians Are Fighting Back appeared first on TIME.
