The California-based reggae band Stick Determine has been round for 20 years, eight albums, and numerous hours on the street, however lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has by no means seen a observe take off like “Angels Above Me” did this previous week.
The seven-year-old tune hit number one on the iTunes gross sales charts in six totally different international locations, together with the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, skyrocketing “out of nowhere,” in accordance to Woodruff.
Stick Determine has had loads of thrilling milestones before, with albums repeatedly hitting number one in the reggae class, and hit singles amassing a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of streams. However the pace at which this observe went from a years-old sleeper to a smash was new. Folks had been posting TikToks about it, gushing with enthusiasm. “It was thrilling,” Woodruff says. “However then as soon as I discovered it was due to some model that was principally stolen and generated in a single click on, I imply, it’s saddening.”
Stick Determine is grappling with a completely trendy music enterprise conundrum: It has a success tune—however most of the performs and a focus are on unauthorized, robotic remixes that the band and its staff suspect have been spun up with the help of artificial intelligence tools. One remix amassed over 1.8 million performs on YouTube in 5 days. “Proper now, 4 totally different variations are going viral,” says Woodruff. He’s getting royalties for none of them.
The band’s administration staff has been combating to take away these tracks, with various levels of success. As remixes proliferated over the previous week, Stick Determine’s staff has frantically despatched copyright takedown notices and contacted all the main streamers, even reaching out to the particular person account house owners posting remixes. A few of the tracks have been pulled—Spotify has taken down all of the tracks requested, and that viral YouTube video has been eliminated, too—however others stay. When contacted by the administration staff, certainly one of the remix purveyors insisted that the tune was a canopy and provided to share a few of the royalties, however the Stick Determine staff sees these tracks as remixes that do not correctly credit score or compensate the band. “It’s primarily a recreation of whack-a-mole,” says Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Data, which manages Stick Determine.
Over the previous few years, an ever-escalating onslaught of AI-generated music has roiled the music business. In accordance to the French streaming service Deezer, the quantity of AI songs it detects day by day has jumped from 18 p.c in 2025 to 44 p.c in 2026, or over 2 million tracks monthly. It estimates that 85 p.c of those tracks are fraudulent—slop created particularly to siphon royalties. In the meantime, there are firms providing AI song remix tools, making it easy to churn out ersatz variations of songs at an unlimited scale.
Folks have been grooving to unauthorized remixes for an extended, very long time. In the early 2000s, when mashups exploded in recognition, artists wrestled with how to tackle unauthorized variations of their work, like when the Beatles and Jay-Z had to resolve how to method Hazard Mouse’s Gray Album, which spliced their albums collectively. The file label EMI, which owned the Beatles’ sound recordings, issued cease-and desists, turning the technically illicit album into an underground sensation. “In the TikTok period, we are continuously seeing songs blow up, and it has nothing to do with the artist, or it is a remix that the artist did not make,” says Chris Dalla Riva, an information analyst and musician.
Dalla Riva sees what occurred with R&B artist Steve Lacy’s 2022 tune “Unhealthy Behavior” as a transparent precursor to Stick Determine’s dilemma. It was already a success when individuals began importing sped-up remixes to TikTok; these chipmunky unauthorized variations proved so fashionable that Lacy’s file label convinced him to launch an official observe to capitalize on the development.
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