The Sweet Enoughs were icing on Paul Bender’s cake. His band Hiatus Kaiyote had been sampled by Beyonce, Drake and Kendrick Lamar. They’d been nominated for three Grammys. Now, with his instrumental exotica project Sweet Enoughs, the Melbourne musician and producer was clocking millions of streams and praise from the likes of Tyler, the Creator.
Sweet. Until he noticed some tracks he did not recall recording – or uploading.
Musician Paul Bender is battling Spotify to get music falsely uploaded under his name off the platform.Credit: Simon Schluter
“It was probably the worst attempt at music I’ve ever heard. Just absolutely cooked,” he says of the track that appeared uninvited on the Sweet Enoughs’ Spotify profile early this year. “At first I thought maybe someone had just made their first track and chose the same name. But then it happened again. And again. And again.
“That’s when I realised — this is a scam.”
What he and thousands of followers were hearing were fakes: poorly produced muzak with generic cover art, uploaded under his project’s name. The tracks were so lame he has no doubt they were AI-generated.
They were also alarmingly easy to place. On YouTube, Bender watched music tech vlogger TankTheTech demonstrate how an AI-generated song could be uploaded to any artist’s profile in 10 minutes — no hacking, no passwords, no authentication.
“It’s actually insane,” he says. “There’s not even one-step verification. You could go put some music on my profile right now.”
The issue isn’t limited to Spotify. The same fakes soon appeared on Tidal, Apple Music, YouTube Music and Deezer. “You upload through a digital distributor, click one box and it goes everywhere. No checks. No verification.”
Fake tracks began appearing on the pages of metalcore acts in 2024, including Australian bands Alpha Wolf and Thy Art Is Murder. They sparked chatter in tech mags and fan forums, but Bender sees a bigger picture: not a glitch, but a loophole big enough to drive a business model through.
“If this doesn’t change, people are going to start training AI on your entire discography. Then they upload songs that actually sound like you. Fans go to your page, hear something that sort of sounds right — but it’s shit.”
Paul Bender (at right) with his band Hiatus Kaiyote: (from left) Perrin Moss, Simon Mavin and Naomi Saalfield aka Nai Palm.
The problem, he says, is wilful inaction from distributors and streamers. Even basic password protection “would solve 99 per cent of these cases overnight. Two-factor authentication would solve more. These tech companies are full of developers who could fix this in an afternoon.”
So far “it’s just them passing the buck — ‘it’s the distributor’s fault, no, it’s the platform’s fault’. It’s a copout. It just proves how demoralising this system is for artists.”
Spotify, which commands more than 30 per cent of the global streaming market, acknowledged the fakes issue in 2023 when it removed tens of thousands of tracks uploaded by AI music startup Boomy. That followed pressure from Universal Music Group, its biggest licensor.
The Sweet Enoughs’ boutique label, Wondercore Island, has had less success. “It took Spotify six weeks to lift a finger,” says label head Si Jay Gould. “They’re calling it a ‘mapping issue’ — as if four artists just happened to release terrible AI music under our name.
“There’s no incentive to protect us. We’re being impersonated, we’re losing income, our brand is being damaged, and the response is: ‘We’ve done what we can.’ It shows how little they value artists.”
Even now, though Spotify has uncoupled the four fakes from the Sweet Enoughs’ profile, the tracks remain live under that name, ready to deceive fans looking for real music.
Spotify declined to comment for this story. When asked about authentication systems, an Australian spokesperson referred us to the company’s extensive Spotify for Artists educational manuals.
The scale of hijacking “can’t be human”, Gould says. “The money’s too marginal.” Like those old computer scams creaming fractions of cents from millions of bank accounts, “it has to be automated. I assume they’re targeting artists who do well in the algorithm — names the system likes.”
Industry indicators confirm a growing problem. Deezer reported that 18 per cent of its daily uploads in early 2025 were fully AI-generated. Music generator Mubert claims over 100 million AI tracks were created on its platform in the first half of 2023.
The global Music Fights Fraud Alliance estimates 10 per cent of global streams are fraudulent, often driven by bots, fake profiles or click farms. Some distributors report fraud rates of up to 50 per cent, potentially diverting up to $US3 billion annually from artists.
Now musicians are fighting back. Michael League, best known as leader of American jazz collective Snarky Puppy, says he has collected “several dozen testimonials from artists of various genres and levels of visibility recounting their experiences with AI-generated music being uploaded to their account without their consent”.
League has briefed the Recording Academy’s New York chapter on the hijacking of his own solo artist profile. He says senior executive director Nick Cucci has indicated he will escalate the complaint within the Grammy organisation this week.
“I’ve been both shocked and horrified by the volume of messages I’ve received,” League says. “It’s like a silent epidemic in our industry.”
Behind the languid chill of The Sweet Enoughs, Paul Bender is fuming. “It’s not resolved, it’s multiplying,” he says. “I’m f---ing ropeable … You’re building towards a new album, and suddenly this steaming pile of crap lands in the middle of your Spotify profile. It’s vile and disrespectful.
“There are people in this industry who seem to actively loathe musicians. It’s almost sadistic. Real human music and AI slop are the same to them. It’s all just a commodity. It’s all just content.”
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