Stick Figure's seven-year-old song 'Angels Above Me' hit No. 1 on iTunes sales charts in 6 countries this past week, including the United Kingdom, Austria and Canada — and the California reggae band is getting paid for almost none of it. Lead vocalist Scott Woodruff says the surge was driven by unauthorized AI remixes the band never sanctioned, with one version pulling 1.8 million YouTube plays in 5 days. Four different remixes are circulating simultaneously, according to Woodruff, none of them routing royalties to the band that wrote the song.
The band has been together 20 years and put out 8 albums. Woodruff says he has never seen anything take off this fast, and the speed itself is the tell: a dormant catalog track does not jump to the top of iTunes in 6 countries without something engineered pushing it there.
'It was exciting,' Woodruff said. 'But then once I found it was because of some version that was basically stolen and generated in one click, I mean, it's saddening.'
Key facts
- 01Stick Figure's 'Angels Above Me,' a 7-year-old song, hit No. 1 on iTunes sales charts in 6 countries including the UK, Austria and Canada.
- 02One unauthorized remix racked up 1.8 million YouTube plays in 5 days; the band says 4 different versions are currently viral.
- 03Deezer detects AI songs in 44% of daily uploads in 2026, up from 18% in 2025 — over 2 million tracks a month.
- 04Deezer estimates 85% of those AI tracks are fraudulent royalty grabs.
- 05Spotify removed over 75 million spammy tracks in September as part of its anti-slop push.
Ineffable Records, which manages Stick Figure, has spent the week firing copyright takedowns at every major platform and contacting individual uploaders. Spotify pulled every track the team flagged. The 1.8 million-play YouTube remix is gone. Others are still up. 'It's essentially a game of whack-a-mole,' said Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Records. One uploader claimed the track was a cover and offered to split royalties, an offer the band rejected.
“Deezer says AI songs jumped from 18% of daily uploads in 2025 to 44% in 2026 — over 2 million tracks a month, with 85% flagged as fraudulent royalty siphons.”— Jaeden Schafer
The macro numbers explain why the whack-a-mole never ends. Deezer, the French streaming service, says AI-generated tracks now account for 44% of daily uploads in 2026, up from 18% in 2025 — more than 2 million tracks a month flowing into its catalog. Deezer estimates 85% of those AI tracks are fraudulent, built specifically to siphon royalty payments from legitimate artists. That is the baseline the entire streaming economy is now operating against.
Spotify said in September it removed over 75 million spammy tracks as part of an anti-slop push, and is testing an artist protection feature to stop AI-generated music from being misattributed to real performers. 'For any manipulated streams on Spotify, we remove those streams from play counts and withhold royalties,' said Laura Batey, Spotify associate director of corporate communications.
Deezer research director Manuel Moussallam said the volume problem makes pre-emptive policing hard. 'As soon as we are alerted of content that doesn't belong on an artist profile, we take action and remove it from the profile in question. However, unless we detect fraudulent behavior in terms of manipulation to boost streams on a particular song, streams are paid for to whoever uploaded them, via their distributor,' Moussallam said. He added that there is no centralized database of legitimate releases, so distinguishing a real artist's new distributor from a slop farm is genuinely difficult from the platform side.
Unauthorized remixes are not new. In the early 2000s, the Beatles and Jay-Z had to decide how to handle Danger Mouse's Grey Album, with EMI eventually issuing cease-and-desists. In 2022, sped-up TikTok remixes of Steve Lacy's 'Bad Habit' got so big his label put out an official version to capture the trend. The infrastructure to route royalties on remixes mostly works when a human is behind the remix.
'In the TikTok era, we are constantly seeing songs blow up, and it has nothing to do with the artist, or it's a remix that the artist did not make,' said Chris Dalla Riva, a data analyst and musician. 'AI has been a whole new can of worms.' The cultural framing has flipped too — Danger Mouse was treated as the underdog. The operator spinning up four AI remixes in an afternoon to harvest a viral moment is not.
The counterweight is enforcement reality. Spotify's 75 million takedowns and Deezer's labeling program are real, but they are reactive, and the upload pipeline is firehosing 2 million suspected AI tracks a month into Deezer alone. Distributors collect their cut on the way in, platforms pay out by default unless fraud is proven, and the legitimate artist is left filing notices one URL at a time. Woodruff wants distributors to scan audio and lyrics against copyrighted catalogs at upload. 'They should have systems in place,' he said. 'All the audio should be scanned, and if there's copyrighted audio or copyrighted lyrics, it should automatically get flagged.'
The Stick Figure episode is a clean case study in how generative audio breaks the streaming royalty stack. The tools to clone a vocal, retitle the file and ship it to a distributor cost effectively nothing; the tools to detect and remove that file at scale do not yet exist on the platform side, and the economic incentives for distributors and streamers to build them are weaker than the incentives for slop operators to keep uploading. Until the scanning Woodruff is asking for becomes a default at ingestion rather than a takedown after the fact, the artist with the actual hit will keep watching someone else collect on it — and Stick Figure, currently working on its ninth album, will keep filing notices.
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