This Reggae Band Is in a Nightmare Battle Against AI Slop Remixes

The California-based reggae set Stick Figure has been astir for 20 years, 8 albums, and countless hours connected the road, but pb vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has ne'er seen a way instrumentality disconnected similar “Angels Above Me” did this past week.

The six-year-old opus deed fig 1 connected the iTunes income charts successful six antithetic countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, skyrocketing “out of nowhere,” according to Woodruff.

Stick Figure has had plentifulness of thrilling milestones before, with albums repeatedly hitting fig 1 successful the reggae category, and deed singles amassing hundreds of millions of streams. But the velocity astatine which this way went from a years-old sleeper to a smash was new. People were posting TikToks astir it, gushing with enthusiasm. “It was exciting,” Woodruff says. “But past erstwhile I recovered it was due to the fact that of immoderate mentation that was fundamentally stolen and generated successful 1 click, I mean, it’s saddening.”

Stick Figure is grappling with a thoroughly modern euphony concern conundrum: It has a deed tune—but astir of the plays and attraction are connected unauthorized, robotic remixes that the set and its squad fishy person been spun up with the assistance of artificial quality tools. One remix amassed implicit 1.8 cardinal plays connected YouTube successful 5 days. “Right now, 4 antithetic versions are going viral,” says Woodruff. He’s getting royalties for nary of them.

The band’s statement has been warring to region these tracks, with varying degrees of success. As remixes proliferated implicit the past week, Stick Figure’s squad has frantically sent copyright takedown notices and contacted each the large streamers, adjacent reaching retired to the idiosyncratic relationship owners posting remixes. Some of the tracks person been pulled—Spotify has taken down each of the tracks requested, and that viral YouTube video has been removed, too—but others remain. When contacted by the label, 1 of the remix purveyors insisted that the opus was a screen and offered to stock immoderate of the royalties, but the Stick Figure squad sees these tracks arsenic remixes that bash not decently recognition oregon compensate the band. “It’s fundamentally a crippled of whack-a-mole,” says Adam Gross, president of the band’s label, Ineffable Records.

Over the past fewer years, an ever-escalating onslaught of AI-generated euphony has roiled the euphony industry. According to the French streaming work Deezer, the magnitude of AI songs it detects regular has jumped from 18 percent successful 2025 to 44 percent successful 2026, oregon implicit 2 cardinal tracks per month. It estimates that 85 percent of these tracks are fraudulent—slop created specifically to siphon royalties. Meanwhile, determination are companies offering AI opus remix tools, making it elemental to churn retired ersatz versions of songs astatine a immense scale.

People person been grooving to unauthorized remixes for a long, agelong time. In the aboriginal 2000s, erstwhile mashups exploded successful popularity, artists wrestled with however to code unauthorized versions of their work, similar erstwhile the Beatles and Jay-Z had to determine however to attack Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which spliced their albums together. The grounds statement EMI, which owned the Beatles’ dependable recordings, issued cease-and desists, turning the technically illicit medium into an underground sensation. “In the TikTok era, we are perpetually seeing songs stroke up, and it has thing to bash with the artist, oregon it's a remix that the creator did not make,” says Chris Dalla Riva, a information expert and musician.

Dalla Riva sees what happened with R&B creator Steve Lacy’s 2022 opus “Bad Habit” arsenic a wide precursor to Stick Figure’s dilemma. It was already a deed erstwhile radical started uploading sped-up remixes to TikTok; these chipmunky unauthorized versions proved truthful fashionable that Lacy’s grounds statement convinced him to merchandise an authoritative way to capitalize connected the trend.