A Philadelphia folk duo lost 94% of their Spotify royalties after AI bots duplicated their album, altered the playback speed, and re-uploaded it under a fake artist name. This incident highlights a growing crisis in streaming rights where artificial intelligence enables low-cost fraud that directly drains revenue from independent songwriters and labels.
The Mechanics of the AI Hijack
Owen Lyman-Schmidt, a private detective and member of the mandolin-bass duo Makeshift Hammer, discovered the theft when a fan reported an album on Spotify that sounded like his music but was “distorted a bit.” The album, titled Carey Dupont, was attributed to an artist with no online presence, no social media, and AI-generated artwork that failed to make logical sense. The song titles were nearly identical to the duo’s originals but slightly altered—“All My Friend” instead of “All My Friends,” and “Banker and a Liar” instead of “Bankers and Liars”—to evade automated detection software.
The tracks were the duo’s actual recordings, merely sped up or slowed down to distort the sound while remaining easily recognizable. In the year before discovery, the fake album accumulated nearly 50,000 listens per track, while the original recordings, released four years earlier, had only 1,000 to 2,000 listens each. By the time the duo identified the fraud, the fake album had surpassed 650,000 total listens, with evidence pointing to obvious bot inflation.
Financial Impact and Platform Accountability
Online royalty estimators suggest the 650,000 fraudulent streams generated between $1,600 and $2,600 in payouts. While this amount seems small for a single case, Lyman-Schmidt notes that repeating this scheme across hundreds of low-profile bands creates a living wage for scammers without the physical toll of touring. The theft directly reduced Makeshift Hammer’s share of Spotify’s royalty pool, as the platform pays artists based on their percentage of total streams rather than increasing the total pool size.
Lyman-Schmidt criticized Spotify’s royalty structure for allowing the platform to pass the financial costs of scammers onto artists rather than addressing its inability to monitor the platform. He discovered that both the Carey Dupont and a second fake album, Powerful Thinking of Hayden Donne, were distributed via SoundCloud. After contacting SoundCloud and Spotify, Lyman-Schmidt received only automated responses and silence, raising concerns about the lack of enforcement against streaming fraud.
This case mirrors similar incidents involving other Philadelphia musicians, including Katie Feeney (Roberta Faceplant), who also faced AI-stolen tracks. As AI-generated content floods streaming platforms, rights holders and radio professionals must demand stronger verification protocols to protect artist revenue and maintain market integrity.
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