Reggae Band Fights AI Slop Remixes in Legal Battle
▼ Summary
– Stick Figure’s six-year-old song “Angels Above Me” hit number one on iTunes sales charts in six countries, surprising lead vocalist Scott Woodruff with its sudden popularity.
– The song’s viral success is largely due to unauthorized, AI-generated remixes that amassed millions of plays, for which the band receives no royalties.
– The band’s label, Ineffable Records, is struggling to remove these remixes through copyright takedowns, describing the effort as a “game of whack-a-mole.”
– AI-generated music is increasingly flooding the industry, with Deezer reporting that 44% of detected songs in 2026 are AI-made, and 85% are fraudulent royalty-siphoning slop.
– Unauthorized remixes are not new, with past examples like Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, but the TikTok era amplifies the issue of songs blowing up through remixes not made by the artist.
The California reggae band Stick Figure has spent two decades building a career through eight albums and countless live shows, but lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff says nothing compares to the sudden explosion of their six-year-old song “Angels Above Me” this past week. The track unexpectedly soared to number one on the iTunes sales charts in six countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, appearing “out of nowhere,” Woodruff recalls.
The band has enjoyed plenty of high points before, with albums regularly topping the reggae charts and hit singles racking up hundreds of millions of streams. But the velocity of this track’s rise from a forgotten catalog piece to a viral sensation was unprecedented. Fans flooded TikTok with enthusiastic posts, and the momentum felt exhilarating. “It was exciting,” Woodruff says. “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.”
Stick Figure now finds itself wrestling with a distinctly modern dilemma in the music business: a genuine hit is finally catching fire, yet the vast majority of plays and attention belong to unauthorized, robotic remixes that the band and its label suspect were created using artificial intelligence tools. One such remix racked up over 1.8 million plays on YouTube in just five days. “Right now, four different versions are going viral,” Woodruff explains, adding that he receives no royalties from any of them.
The band’s label, Ineffable Records, has been scrambling to remove these tracks, with mixed results. Over the past week, Stick Figure’s team has issued a flurry of copyright takedown notices, contacted major streaming platforms, and even reached out directly to the account owners posting the remixes. Some tracks have been pulled , Spotify complied with all takedown requests, and the viral YouTube video was removed , but others remain active. When the label contacted one remix creator, that person insisted the track was a cover and offered to share royalties. Stick Figure’s camp sees it differently, arguing these are remixes that fail to properly credit or compensate the original artists. “It’s essentially a game of whack-a-mole,” says Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Records.
The broader music industry has been grappling with a relentless surge of AI-generated music in recent years. According to French streaming service Deezer, the percentage of AI songs it detects daily has jumped from 18 percent in 2025 to 44 percent in 2026, amounting to over 2 million tracks per month. Deezer estimates that 85 percent of these are fraudulent , essentially slop designed to siphon royalties. Meanwhile, companies now offer AI-powered remix tools that make it trivially easy to churn out unauthorized versions of songs at massive scale.
Unauthorized remixes are hardly a new phenomenon. In the early 2000s, mashups exploded in popularity, forcing artists to decide how to handle unapproved versions of their work. A prime example is Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which blended the Beatles and Jay-Z. EMI, which controlled the Beatles’ sound recordings, sent cease-and-desist letters, turning the technically illegal album into an underground sensation. “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,” notes Chris Dalla Riva, a data analyst and musician.
Dalla Riva sees a clear parallel between Stick Figure’s situation and what happened with R&B artist Steve Lacy’s 2022 hit “Bad Habit.” That song was already popular when sped-up remixes began circulating on TikTok. These unauthorized, chipmunk-voiced versions proved so popular that Lacy’s label convinced him to release an official version to capitalize on the trend, setting a precedent for the kind of scramble Stick Figure now faces.
(Source: Wired)
