Music Business Worldwide write
In yet another sign that Drake’s megastardom is nowhere near its end after more than a decade of topping the charts, the Canadian-born hip-hop artist has seen two new tracks go viral in just the past few days.
But hang on – those aren’t Drake tracks at all. They’re AI-generated spoofs, and they’re the clearest sign yet of the headaches that AI audio tools are starting to cause the music industry.
As MBW reported earlier today (April 17), one of these ‘fake Drake’ tracks is an apparent original composition called heart on my sleeve, created by an ‘artist’ called ghostwriter.
It features AI vocals replicating the voices of both Drake and The Weeknd. And it has, via the help of an unknown distributor, made its way to numerous streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, Deezer, SoundCloud, and YouTube/YouTube Music.
Yet over the course of today, MBW has noticed that three of these streaming platforms – Apple Music, Deezer, and TIDAL – appear to have pulled the track down.
UPDATE: As of 18.40 ET, around 3 hours after this story was first published, the track is no longer available on Spotify.
At the time of publication, heart on my sleeve remains available on YouTube/YouTube Music (where it has over 231k plays).
It’s also still up on SoundCloud (127k plays), and Spotify – where it’s now surpassed 625k plays, while doubling its monthly active user count within 24 hours (see below).
