Folk Singer’s Spotify Hijacked by AI-Generated Clones

Folk musician Murphy Campbell logged into Spotify in January and found songs she’d never uploaded. They were hers—kind of. Someone had scraped her YouTube performances, run them through AI voice synthesis, and posted the fake covers to streaming platforms under her name.

Campbell wasn’t alone in discovering this. The incident exposed a gap between how fast AI can generate convincing music and how slow platforms move to stop it. The fake tracks stayed live long enough to rack up plays and royalties that Campbell never saw.

What made it worse: when Campbell tried to remove them, she ran into a copyright system designed to protect rights holders—except the system couldn’t tell the difference between her real recordings and the AI fakes someone else created in her voice. Copyright claims got tangled. Takedown requests stalled.

The situation highlights why artists are increasingly vulnerable. YouTube, Spotify, and other platforms have gotten better at detecting copyright violations, but they’re still struggling with deepfakes. An AI voice clone is technically a derivative work—but whose copyright does it violate? The original artist’s? The person who trained the AI? The person who uploaded it?

Campbell’s case shows the system breaks down when both rights enforcement and AI generation move faster than the platforms designed to manage them.