The California-based reggae band Stick Figure has been around for 20 years, eight albums, and countless hours on the road, but lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has never seen a track take off like “Angels Above Me” did this past week.
The seven-year-old song hit number one on the iTunes sales charts in six different countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, skyrocketing “out of nowhere,” according to Woodruff.
Stick Figure has had plenty of thrilling milestones before, with albums repeatedly hitting number one in the reggae category, and hit singles amassing hundreds of millions of streams. But the speed at which this track went from a years-old sleeper to a smash was new. People were posting TikToks about it, gushing with enthusiasm. “It was exciting,” Woodruff says. “But then once I found it was because of some version that was basically stolen and generated in one click, I mean, it’s saddening.”
Stick Figure is grappling with a thoroughly modern music business conundrum: It has a hit tune—but most of the plays and attention are on unauthorized, robotic remixes that the band and its team suspect have been spun up with the help of artificial intelligence tools. One remix amassed over 1.8 million plays on YouTube in five days. “Right now, four different versions are going viral,” says Woodruff. He’s getting royalties for none of them.
The band’s management team has been fighting to remove these tracks, with varying degrees of success. As remixes proliferated over the past week, Stick Figure’s team has frantically sent copyright takedown notices and contacted all the major streamers, even reaching out to the individual account owners posting remixes. Some of the tracks have been pulled—Spotify has taken down all of the tracks requested, and that viral YouTube video has been removed, too—but others remain. When contacted by the management team, one of the remix purveyors insisted that the song was a cover and offered to share some of the royalties, but the Stick Figure team sees these tracks as remixes that do not properly credit or compensate the band. “It’s essentially a game of whack-a-mole,” says Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Records, which manages Stick Figure.
Over the past few years, an ever-escalating onslaught of AI-generated music has roiled the music industry. According to the French streaming service Deezer, the amount of AI songs it detects daily has jumped from 18 percent in 2025 to 44 percent in 2026, or over 2 million tracks per month. It estimates that 85 percent of these tracks are fraudulent—slop created specifically to siphon royalties. Meanwhile, there are companies offering AI song remix tools, making it simple to churn out ersatz versions of songs at a vast scale.
People have been grooving to unauthorized remixes for a long, long time. In the early 2000s, when mashups exploded in popularity, artists wrestled with how to address unauthorized versions of their work, like when the Beatles and Jay-Z had to decide how to approach Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which spliced their albums together. The record label EMI, which owned the Beatles’ sound recordings, issued cease-and desists, turning the technically illicit album into an underground sensation. “In the TikTok era, we are constantly seeing songs blow up, and it has nothing to do with the artist, or it's a remix that the artist did not make,” says Chris Dalla Riva, a data analyst and musician.
Dalla Riva sees what happened with R&B artist Steve Lacy’s 2022 song “Bad Habit” as a clear precursor to Stick Figure’s dilemma. It was already a hit when people started uploading sped-up remixes to TikTok; these chipmunky unauthorized versions proved so popular that Lacy’s record label convinced him to release an official track to capitalize on the trend.
While the music industry has developed infrastructure to route royalties to remixed artists, “AI has been a whole new can of worms,” says Dalla Riva. In the past, rogue remixers tended to be hailed as anti-establishment types; Danger Mouse wasn’t considered the villain in the Grey Album saga, but rather the record executives stifling creative expression. Now, though, widespread backlash to the rise of generative AI tools has recast the dynamics.
Some streamers have announced initiatives to combat unwanted AI slop on their platforms; Spotify, for example, is testing an “artist protection feature” to help prevent AI-generated music from being attributed to real artists. This past September, the Swedish streamer removed over 75 million “spammy tracks” in its effort to fight AI slop. “For any manipulated streams on Spotify, we remove those streams from play counts and withhold royalties,” says Spotify associate director of corporate communications Laura Batey.
But the problem persists. One of the primary issues is the sheer gamut of music uploaded daily. Deezer, which takes a uniquely transparent approach to identifying and labeling AI songs, says that the volume of tracks they handle every day makes preemptively banishing grifters difficult. “As soon as we are alerted of content that doesn’t belong on an artist profile, we take action and remove it from the profile in question. However, unless we detect fraudulent behavior in terms of manipulation to boost streams on a particular song, streams are paid for to whoever uploaded them, via their distributor,” Deezer research director Manuel Moussallam tells WIRED via email. “From the perspective of a streaming platform, it is sometimes hard to know whether a release is legitimate or not. It's common for artists to change labels or distributors, and there is no centralized database of what legitimate releases are.”
Woodruff would like to see music distribution companies take a more proactive approach to culling knockoffs. “They should have systems in place,” he says. “All the audio should be scanned, and if there's copyrighted audio or copyrighted lyrics, it should automatically get flagged.”
As he waits for the industry to catch up with technology, Woodruff is forging ahead the old-fashioned way; he’s working on Stick Figure’s ninth album now.
5/7/26, 9:20 AM EDT: WIRED corrected some details about Stick Figure's management team and the year “Angels Above Me” was released.
