When your favorite band’s new song is an AI fake : NPR

Here We Go Magic performed at the Wiltern in Los Angeles in 2009.

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This wasn’t how Los Angeles musician Luke Temple expected to start his Monday.

Temple was the frontman for the indie rock band Here We Go Magic, who hasn’t released music since 2015, which made the flood of messages arriving in his inbox quite confusing.

“I woke up to DMs on Instagram saying, ‘Apparently Here We Go Magic released a new song?’ Of course, that’s not 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 airy sound of synthesizers and swirling, psychedelic-inspired guitars, is the work of artificial intelligence.

The song, titled “Water Spring Mountain,” is accompanied by an illustration of a waterfall. This too appears to be a creation of AI.

Welcome as a music artist to 2025, when streaming platforms are bombarded with AI-generated spam and AI scammers try 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, the former band of Wilco singer Jeff Tweedy. The same thing happened to electro-pop artist Sophie, who died in 2021. And to country music singer Blaze Foley, who died in 1989, her Spotify page was vandalized with AI songs.

“This is by no means a new problem,” said Charley Kiefer, head of digital account strategy for music label Secretly Canadian, which released Here We Go Magic albums. “But it’s a problem that is likely to become increasingly prevalent without corrective action from plug and play distributors and DSPs,” he said, referring to digital service providers like Spotify.

Targeting Dormant Groups with AI Songs to “Raise a Few Pennies”

Most AI songs imitating real artists are far from convincing.

The AI-imitating track Here We Go Magic begins with an acoustic guitar strum that sounds like a computer imitating pop-rock over the lyrics: “I just know how to whisper your melody on the breeze,” which wouldn’t fool any fan of Temple’s music.

But if the motivation is to make an insignificant amount of money, it may have been successful.

Recording artists, of course, will be quick to tell you that you would have to replicate this tactic on an industrial scale to one day make a living.

Temple says that if the strategy is to target bands and artists who haven’t released music in years, AI scammers could probably do that a lot before getting caught.

“It makes sense to go after a group like ours, because who’s to say we’re checking or paying attention,” Temple said. “It seems like they might do this to smaller groups, or dormant groups, to cast a really wide net and collect a few pennies and hope no one notices.”

When NPR contacted Spotify about IA’s song, a company spokesperson said it would soon be removed from Here We Go Magic’s artist profile.

The spokesperson highlighted Spotify’s new AI protections for artists and music producers, which include increased enforcement of identity thieves, as in this case.

The platform admits it is battling a relentless torrent of AI garbage. Spotify claims to have removed 75 million “spam” tracks from the platform in the past year alone.

“As music moves through a complex supply chain, bad actors sometimes exploit loopholes to insert incorrect content into artist profiles,” Spotify’s spokesperson told NPR.

Tidal confirmed to NPR that it removed the song, saying it reflected a broader problem affecting music services.

“All platforms are experiencing an influx of AI leads submitted through third-party distributors. We are working on better ways to identify, label and, if necessary, remove AI content,” a Tidal spokesperson said.

YouTube did not respond to requests for comment.

The Spotify spokesperson pointed out that the platform recently launched a tool allowing artists to report incompatible releases before songs go live.

But as with all online scams and spam, it’s a game of cat and mouse, now enhanced by AI tools.

Part of the problem is that music labels and artists don’t upload their 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 create an AI song that attempts to imitate a real artist in seconds. As more AI companies develop similar AI music generators to stay competitive, the ability to instantly create an AI song will be in more and more hands.

Los Angeles musician Temple said it wasn’t just an AI-spammed song that took a fraction of a penny off the band with each play, but also the brazen identity theft that was the real travesty.

“It’s so predatory and so terrible,” he said. “The premise is really horrible. We worked hard for a decade and made almost no money.”