The great music hijack: How AI impersonators are siphoning royalties, and distorting the souls of Indie musicians

Mint. “This let the impersonator collect the publishing royalties, while my artist page absorbed the poor performance signals from the fake streams.”Tewari says the tracks weren’t just misattributed but appeared to be generated and uploaded at scale.

His own search suggested a likely pathway where songs are generated instantly by artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Suno, and then uploaded through distributors by tagging an existing artiste’s name.Tewari and his team moved quickly to get the fakes taken down, but it took all of three days. And in streaming, three days can be long enough to matter.“Tracks that perform poorly can distort the data that platforms use to read an artiste’s engagement and momentum and those signals do not always disappear even when the songs do,” says Tewari.For many artistes, this isn’t an isolated shock but a recurring phenomenon now amplified by AI generated music.Varun Rajput, frontman of the rock band Antariksh, says misattributed tracks have appeared on his profiles way too many times, sometimes as random devotional or regional songs sitting awkwardly alongside a rock catalogue.“It’s pretty annoying, especially when fans point it out,” he said, adding that getting such tracks removed often involves manual forms and outreach to platform teams.These incidents point to a new and murky vulnerability in the digital music space.

A fake artiste economy where AI generated or impersonation tracks can exploit the name, audience and credibility of real musicians is taking shape.“It’s very easy to do this. And now with AI… it’s not just 12 songs, it could be a thousand,” said Tewari.Across streaming platforms, versions of this have already begun to surface.In late 2024, artistes who had removed