Makeshift Hammer, a two-piece folk act from Philadelphia, learned from a fan that its own recordings were on Spotify under someone else's name. An album called Blue Road, credited to an unknown artist named Carey Dupont, contained the band's songs sped up or slowed down just enough to slip past recognition software, with near-identical titles and mismatched artwork.
Owen Lyman-Schmidt, who has played in the duo for twelve years alongside a day job as a private detective, wrote up the case. He says each copied track had drawn around 50,000 plays in a year while the originals, out for four years, had one or two thousand. Blue Road later passed 650,000 plays, a pace he attributes to bots, worth an estimated $1,600 to $2,600.
About six months later a second clone album, under the name Hayden Donne, racked up hundreds of thousands more streams before vanishing. He traced both releases to SoundCloud as distributor; SoundCloud replied with an automated request for details and Spotify did not reply.
His complaint is with the payout model. Because Spotify divides a fixed royalty pool by share of streams, the fraud costs the platform nothing and comes straight out of small artists' earnings. He argues that is how the service keeps prices low.
The report ties this to a wider pattern: altered and synthetic uploads combined with fake listening, a problem that predates generative AI but has grown with it, and one it says falls hardest on independents while the majors sign AI licensing deals.
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