It wasn't how Los Angeles musician Luke Temple had expected to start his Monday.
Temple was the frontman of indie rock band Here We Go Magic, which has not released music since 2015, a fact that made the flurry of messages hitting his inbox quite baffling.
"I woke up to DMs on Instagram saying, 'Apparently Here We Go Magic released a new track?' Sure doesn't sound like you,'" Temple said. "Then I realized it was on Spotify, Tidal, YouTube, all the streaming platforms."
The song, which bears no resemblance to the band's psychedelic-inspired airy sound of synthesizers and swirling guitars, is the work of artificial intelligence.
Accompanying the song, which is called "Water Spring Mountain," is an illustration of a waterfall. That, too, appears to be an AI creation.
Welcome to being a musical artist in 2025, when streaming platforms are being bombarded with AI-generated spam and AI tricksters are trying to capitalize on the reputation of an inactive band, or even dead artists, to make a quick buck.
Earlier this year, an AI-generated song was uploaded to the page of Uncle Tupelo, Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy's former band. The same happened to electro-pop artist Sophie, who died in 2021. And the country music singer Blaze Foley, who died in 1989, had his Spotify page vandalized with AI songs.
"This is by no means a new problem," said Charley Kiefer, who heads digital account strategy at the music label Secretly Canadian, which released Here We Go Magic's albums. "But it's one that's likely to become increasingly prevalent without remediation from both plug and play distributors and DSPs," he said, referring to digital service providers like Spotify.
Targeting dormant bands with AI songs to 'collect some pennies'
Most of the AI songs emulating real artists are far from persuasive.
The AI track imitating Here We Go Magic starts with an acoustic guitar strum that sounds like a computer imitating pop-rock over the lyrics: "I know just how to whisper your melody on the breeze," which would not fool any fans of Temple's music.
But if the motivation is to make some trifling amount of money, it may have succeeded.
Recording artists, of course, will be quick to tell you that you'd have to reproduce that tactic on an industrial scale to ever eke out a living.
Temple says if the strategy is to target bands and artists who haven't released music in years, the AI scammers could likely do this quite a lot before getting caught.
"It makes sense to go after a band like us, because who's to say we're even checking or paying attention," Temple said. "It seems like they could be doing this to smaller bands, or dormant bands, to cast a really wide net and collect some pennies hoping nobody will notice."
When NPR reached out to Spotify about the AI song, a company spokesman said it would soon be removed from Here We Go Magic's artist profile.
The spokesman pointed to Spotify's new AI protections for artists and music producers, which includes stepped up enforcement of AI impersonators, like in this case.
The platform admits it is fighting against a ceaseless torrent of AI slop. Spotify says it has removed 75 million "spammy" tracks from the platform just in the past year.
"Because music flows through a complex supply chain, bad actors sometimes exploit gaps to push incorrect content onto artist profiles," the Spotify spokesman told NPR.
Tidal confirmed to NPR it removed the song, saying it's reflective of a broader problem plaguing music services.
"All platforms are dealing with an influx of AI tracks being submitted via 3rd party distributors. We are working on better ways to identify, tag, and when necessary remove AI content," a Tidal spokesperson said.
YouTube did not return requests for comment.
The Spotify spokesman noted that the platform recently launched a tool allowing artists to report mismatched releases before songs go live.
But as with all online scams and spam, it's a cat-and-mouse game, now newly supercharged by AI tools.
Part of the challenge is that music labels and artists do not upload songs directly to platforms like Spotify.
Instead, independent distribution services, such as DistroKid and TuneCore, serve as middlemen, often sending songs to streaming services without any authentication process.
The lax rules are being abused by people using services like Suno and Udio, where anyone can make an AI song that attempts to mimic a real artist in a matter of seconds. As more AI companies develop similar AI music generators to stay competitive, the ability to instantly create an AI song will be in even more hands.
Los Angeles musician Temple said it's not just about a spammy AI song taking away a fraction of a cent from the band with every play, it's the shameless identity theft that's the real travesty.
"It's so predatory, and so terrible," he said. "The principle of it is so awful. We worked our asses off for a decade and barely made any money as it is."
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