Why Is It So Easy to Flood Streaming With AI Slop?

My cursor was hovering over the button. I’d just had a conversation with John Ross, a friendly acquaintance of mine, about something weird that happened to him recently. On DSP artist pages for his band Wild Pink, there appeared a song called “Vibe Check.” Wild Pink’s album covers look appealingly homespun. This one featured a queasy-slick image of a few bottle-service DJs camped out high in the hills above L.A. The music could be described as Minor Lazer: vaguely Caribbean rhythms, weak-ass synth horn breakdowns, an uncanny-valley voice delivering lyrics about partying “‘til we can’t feel our legs.” Ross didn’t make “Vibe Check” and didn’t know who did. It sounded nothing like Wild Pink. It seemed like an obvious AI scam, but he didn’t understand exactly how someone had managed to force it onto his streaming profiles. He wondered: Should he change his Spotify password?

That probably wouldn’t help, I told him. I’d been recording our interview, as is my usual practice as a journalist. A few days later, I opened my account on DistroKid, the service I use to distribute my own songs to streaming, which costs me $3.75 a month. I uploaded the interview audio. I chose Wild Pink as the artist name. When DistroKid pulled up Ross’s artist photo and the name of his most recent album, asking me whether this was the Wild Pink I was looking for, I responded in the affirmative. I typed in “John Talks AI Slop Takeover” as the song title. I checked the boxes at the bottom of the form reading “I recorded this music, and am authorized to sell it in stores worldwide & collect all royalties,” and “I'm not using any other artist's name in my name, song titles, or album title, without their approval.” And I hovered my cursor over the button that read “Continue.”

I didn’t click it. (John, if you’re reading this, I promise, I was never going to.) If I had, there’s a decent chance this 11-minute lo-fi spoken-word opus would have appeared on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube, and elsewhere as Wild Pink’s new single. If you’ve noticed this happening a lot lately, it’s because in many cases, it really is that easy—no hacking or even password entry required. A host of metalcore bands had their artist pages vandalized by fake AI songs last year. Jeff Tweedy’s old band Uncle Tupelo got hit in June, the popular EDM duo Odesza in January. Art-pop innovator Sophie and Texas country cult hero Blaze Foley both had suspiciously AI-sounding new material posted to their pages recently—odd choices of artists to target, considering that Sophie died in 2021 and Foley in 1989. Presumably, the motivation for the scam is financial: When I chose Wild Pink as the artist for “John Talks AI Slop Takeover,” that didn’t stop me from claiming myself as the songwriter and owner of the recording. Were it to become a runaway streaming hit, any associated royalties would be directed to my bank account, not Ross’s. 

Ross, for his part, is puzzled about why Wild Pink of all bands would be targeted by the scam. They’ve got critical acclaim and a devoted audience, with around 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, but they’re not exactly Taylor Swift. Their play counts on the platform range from 1.7 million for their 2021 song “Amalfi” to the middle four figures for various deep cuts. At the top end of that spectrum, there’s real money coming in, even at the fractions of a cent per play that the big streamers pay out; at the bottom, it’s more like a few bucks per song. It’s hard to imagine Wild Pink’s listeners would play a song so blatantly fraudulent as “Vibe Check” enough times to make it worth the effort. “I can’t imagine they made a dollar,” he said. Maybe they’re not making much, or maybe they’re automating their operation at a scale that renders the success or failure of any one song unimportant. “Vibe Check,” with its utter lack of concern for coming across as a convincing Wild Pink song, seems more like the product of a dragnet than a targeted sting.  

Paul Bender, bassist of the Australian jazz-prog-R&B band Hiatus Kaiyote, has been especially impacted by the ease of this scam. Over the course of 2025, streaming pages for his instrumental solo project the Sweet Enoughs have been hit with four different songs that weren’t his. Some he’s fairly certain were AI, others he’s not so sure. “The first one was the most cooked-sounding thing imaginable,” he told me. “It was so bad that I was like, I don’t even think a computer could fuck it up this bad.” He asked his manager and record label to see about getting it taken down, a process that he estimates took six to eight weeks. A week after that song was finally removed, the second one popped up on his page. 

According to Bender, when his team got in touch with the DSPs, they generally took the position that there had simply been a “mapping error.” The people behind the songs that were plaguing his pages were legitimate artists acting in good faith, who happened to also call themselves the Sweet Enoughs, and the platforms’ internal sorting mechanisms had mistakenly associated their music with Bender rather than creating new pages. The way Bender sees it, that explanation is willfully and conveniently naive, allowing the platforms to avoid dealing with what clearly seem to him like malicious actors. “Four different artists with the same name have all just suddenly emerged, doing completely different genres, within a two month period, and they’ve all been stuck on my page?” he said. “It’s such bullshit.”

The experience turned Bender into a spokesman of sorts for closing this strange loophole of the streaming economy. Over the summer, he and a few fellow musicians devised an ingenious and absurd way of drawing attention to it. They would hijack each other’s streaming pages, fill them with the most awful AI music they could come up with, and make a series of videos to demonstrate just how easy it was to do. They called it “Operation Clown Dump.” Across four episodes of the video series, Bender and his friends never once encounter an obstacle that prevents them from accessing each other’s profiles. In episode one, Bender’s own page is briefly populated by an AI simulacrum of wailing bagpipes and dancefloor drums called “Funky Bagpipes Is Why We Need Authentication (This Is Fraud),” and a demonically shredding jazz-pop song called “Daniel Ek’s Bathroom Mirror.” “Daniel Ek was a man, he was a big man,” sings the AI voice in that one, “And he steals from musicians ’cause he knows that he’s shit at guitar.”

“You make your DistroKid account, you generate your song on [AI music software] Suno, which takes all of three seconds, you upload that track via your DistroKid account, generate some artwork with ChatGPT, which also takes a couple of minutes, you tick a box that says ‘I am this person,’ or ‘I am authorized to upload this,’ and press submit, and they just go online,” Bender said. “It was really just to bring awareness to the ridiculousness of the situation. We decided to combat the ridiculousness of it by being ridiculous, and upload hilarious shit to each other’s profiles, which is maybe the best way to demonstrate it.”

The first thing to understand about why the phenomenon is so widespread—why the scam is so easy—is that artists and labels don’t generally upload their work directly to streaming platforms. They use intermediaries called distributors, companies that originally existed to get records into brick-and-mortar stores, but like everything else, have since shifted much of their focus to the internet. These distributors take a range of approaches to their businesses. On one hand, there are professionally oriented companies—RedEye and Secretly are names you may have encountered—that work with rosters of particular labels and artists. Much like labels themselves, they make curatorial and business decisions about who to take on as partners; you can’t just sign up to work with them. Other distributors, like DistroKid and CD Baby, are more straightforwardly customer-facing: Anyone willing to shell out a few dollars per month is welcome to set up an account. And, if they so desire, to start flooding their favorite bands’ profiles with the shittiest music imaginable. 

I spoke with someone who has worked for years at a boutique distributor—smaller than RedEye or Secretly, not as plug-and-play as DistroKid or CD Baby—who told me about some of the safeguards that exist in the industry to protect against confusion or outright sabotage in music distribution. The streaming platforms generally place artists with a certain level of popularity onto watchlists, which require a greater burden of proof than a checked box. (These lists aren’t generally discussed in Spotify’s public-facing marketing, but you can find references to them on various distributors’ customer support pages.) But it wasn’t clear to this person exactly what level of popularity is required to earn a spot on the watchlist. That murky threshold may help to explain why the artists that encounter this issue tend to be popular but not stratospherically so—enough that the uploader stands a chance of making money, but not enough for the artist to be on the watchlist. (Or why, perhaps, the scammers have bedeviled Paul Bender’s solo project, with 76,000 monthly listeners, and not his main band, with 1.7 million.)

The distribution worker pointed out that, among DSPs and distributors that cater to established labels, there is a sort of built-in trust, based in mutual interest, that keeps the system running smoothly, at least in theory. The players are generally not trying to defraud each other. Everyone—artist, label, distributor, platform—has their reasons to keep the system working as intended; no one wants artist pages to be drenched in slop. But the direct-to-consumer distribution companies may not be as strongly incentivized to keep clean houses. Because their revenue is based on individual subscriber fees, and not the success or failure of the music they distribute, these companies don’t have to be particularly concerned with what happens once the subscribers’ music actually hits streaming platforms. The person most likely to complain, in these AI scam scenarios—the artist whose page is being vandalized—may not even be a client of the distributor that’s being used to do the vandalizing. And the vandal themselves, at the end of the day, is just another happy customer. 

There are a lot of direct-to-consumer distribution companies: 14 alone on Spotify’s list of preferred partners. Given the wide playing field—multiple DSPs, multiple distributors, each with their own ways of operating and relating to each other—there’s not really a single party that can be pinned with responsibility to stop the scam. This also makes it tough to know what to do as an artist if it happens to you: Do you complain to every individual DSP? To your own distributor? To the distributor used to run the scam, which you may not even be able to identify? Any comprehensive solution, like a password associated with an artist’s page on DSPs that must be entered while uploading songs to a distributor, would probably require coordination between multiple companies. Such coordination might be a pain in the ass. But Spotify and its DSP peers are extremely well-capitalized companies that wield enormous influence over the recorded music industry. If they were seriously motivated to implement a password system, they could threaten to stop working with distributors who don’t comply and get them all onboard overnight. 

“It’s really hard for me to think of any kind of transaction that you can do on the internet that doesn’t involve a password or some kind of authentication,” Paul Bender said. “This feels like the only one, and it’s a really important one, and it’s across the entire music streaming ecosystem.” For him, the AI scam problem is “symbolic of how little these tech people give a fuck about actual music and the people who make it.”

Bender sketched out a number of ways the problem might be solved. There could be legislation—unlikely, he admits. Or perhaps one of the DSPs might see some marketing points to be won in defining themselves as the anti-slop platform, and their customers respond positively, and other platforms follow suit. “But it’s hard not to think a little bit conspiratorially about it when they’re happy to pump their playlists full of shit that they’ve generated in-house,” he added, referring to the Muzak-esque stock music that Spotify has reportedly used to pad out mood playlists at the expense of actual artists. To that I would add last year’s dispiriting news that the company would begin treating songs below a certain threshold of streams as unworthy of monetization altogether. A platform stuffed with artless content instead of music? Smaller artists left vulnerable while bigger ones get the white-glove treatment? For the problems to get fixed, they’ll have to be recognized as problems in the first place.