The California-based reggae band Stick Determine has been round for 20 years, eight albums, and numerous hours on the highway, however lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has by no means seen a monitor 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 completely different international locations, together with the UK, Austria, and Canada, skyrocketing “out of nowhere,” in line with Woodruff.
Stick Determine has had loads of thrilling milestones earlier than, with albums repeatedly hitting number one within the reggae class, and hit singles amassing tons of of tens of millions of streams. However the velocity at which this monitor went from a years-old sleeper to a smash was new. Individuals 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 mainly stolen and generated in a single click on, I imply, it’s saddening.”
Stick Determine is grappling with a totally fashionable music enterprise conundrum: It has successful tune—however many of the performs and a spotlight are on unauthorized, robotic remixes that the band and its workforce 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 completely different variations are going viral,” says Woodruff. He’s getting royalties for none of them.
The band’s administration workforce has been preventing to take away these tracks, with various levels of success. As remixes proliferated over the previous week, Stick Determine’s workforce has frantically despatched copyright takedown notices and contacted all the most important streamers, even reaching out to the person account house owners posting remixes. Among the tracks have been pulled—Spotify has taken down all the tracks requested, and that viral YouTube video has been eliminated, too—however others stay. When contacted by the administration workforce, one of many remix purveyors insisted that the tune was a canopy and provided to share among the royalties, however the Stick Determine workforce sees these tracks as remixes that don’t correctly credit score or compensate the band. “It’s primarily a sport 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 line with the French streaming service Deezer, the quantity of AI songs it detects every day has jumped from 18 % in 2025 to 44 % in 2026, or over 2 million tracks per thirty days. It estimates that 85 % of those tracks are fraudulent—slop created particularly to siphon royalties. In the meantime, there are corporations providing AI song remix tools, making it easy to churn out ersatz variations of songs at an enormous scale.
Individuals have been grooving to unauthorized remixes for a protracted, very long time. Within the early 2000s, when mashups exploded in reputation, artists wrestled with tips on how to deal with unauthorized variations of their work, like when the Beatles and Jay-Z needed to resolve tips on 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. “Within the TikTok period, we’re continuously seeing songs blow up, and it has nothing to do with the artist, or it is a remix that the artist didn’t make,” says Chris Dalla Riva, an information analyst and musician.
Dalla Riva sees what occurred with R&B artist Steve Lacy’s 2022 tune “Dangerous Behavior” as a transparent precursor to Stick Determine’s dilemma. It was already successful 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 monitor to capitalize on the development.
