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The California-based reggae<\/span> band Stick Figure has been around for 20 years, eight albums, and countless hours on the road, but lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has never seen a track take off like \u201cAngels Above Me\u201d did this past week.<\/p>\n The seven-year-old song hit number one on the iTunes sales charts in six different countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, skyrocketing \u201cout of nowhere,\u201d according to Woodruff.<\/p>\n Stick Figure has had plenty of thrilling milestones before, with albums repeatedly hitting number one in the reggae category, and hit singles amassing hundreds of millions of streams. But the speed at which this track went from a years-old sleeper to a smash was new. People were posting TikToks about it, gushing with enthusiasm. \u201cIt was exciting,\u201d Woodruff says. \u201cBut then once I found it was because of some version that was basically stolen and generated in one click, I mean, it\u2019s saddening.\u201d<\/p>\n Stick Figure is grappling with a thoroughly modern music business conundrum: It has a hit tune\u2014but most of the plays and attention are on unauthorized, robotic remixes that the band and its team suspect have been spun up with the help of artificial intelligence tools. One remix amassed over 1.8 million plays on YouTube in five days. \u201cRight now, four different versions are going viral,\u201d says Woodruff. He\u2019s getting royalties for none of them.<\/p>\n The band\u2019s management team has been fighting to remove these tracks, with varying degrees of success. As remixes proliferated over the past week, Stick Figure\u2019s team has frantically sent copyright takedown notices and contacted all the major streamers, even reaching out to the individual account owners posting remixes. Some of the tracks have been pulled\u2014Spotify has taken down all of the tracks requested, and that viral YouTube video has been removed, too\u2014but others remain. When contacted by the management team, one of the remix purveyors insisted that the song was a cover and offered to share some of the royalties, but the Stick Figure team sees these tracks as remixes that do not properly credit or compensate the band. \u201cIt\u2019s essentially a game of whack-a-mole,\u201d says Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Records, which manages Stick Figure.<\/p>\n Over the past few years, an ever-escalating onslaught of AI-generated music has roiled the music industry. According to the French streaming service Deezer, the amount of AI songs it detects daily has jumped from 18 percent in 2025 to 44 percent in 2026, or over 2 million tracks per month. It estimates that 85 percent of these tracks are fraudulent\u2014slop created specifically to siphon royalties. Meanwhile, there are companies offering AI song remix tools, making it simple to churn out ersatz versions of songs at a vast scale.<\/p>\n People have been grooving to unauthorized remixes for a long, long time. In the early 2000s, when mashups exploded in popularity, artists wrestled with how to address unauthorized versions of their work, like when the Beatles and Jay-Z had to decide how to approach Danger Mouse\u2019s Grey Album<\/em>, which spliced their albums together. The record label EMI, which owned the Beatles\u2019 sound recordings, issued cease-and desists, turning the technically illicit album into an underground sensation. \u201cIn 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,\u201d says Chris Dalla Riva, a data analyst and musician.<\/p>\n Dalla Riva sees what happened with R&B artist Steve Lacy\u2019s 2022 song \u201cBad Habit\u201d as a clear precursor to Stick Figure\u2019s dilemma. It was already a hit when people started uploading sped-up remixes to TikTok; these chipmunky unauthorized versions proved so popular that Lacy\u2019s record label convinced him to release an official track to capitalize on the trend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n