The seven-year-old song reached No. 1 on the iTunes sales charts in six different countries, including the UK, Austria and Canada, and became a hit “out of nowhere,” according to Woodruff.
Stick Figure has achieved many exciting feats before, with albums repeatedly reaching No. 1 in the reggae genre, and singles amassing hundreds of millions of streams. But the speed with which this track went from year-old sleeper to smash hit was new. People were posting on TikToks about it, and they were gushing with enthusiasm. “It was exciting,” says Woodruff. “But once I found out that it was because of some version that was basically stolen and created with one click, I mean it’s sad.”
Stick Figure grapples with exactly the dilemma of the modern music business: It has a hit tune – but most of the theatrics and interest revolve around unauthorized robotic remixes that the band and its team suspect were spun with the help of artificial intelligence tools. One remix garnered over 1.8 million plays on YouTube in five days. “Right now, there are four different versions going viral,” Woodruff says. He gets royalties for any of them.
The band’s management team struggled to remove these clips with varying degrees of success. As remixes proliferated over the past week, the Stick Figure team frantically sent out copyright takedown notices and contacted all major streamers, even reaching out to individual account holders posting remixes. Some tracks have been pulled – Spotify has removed all requested tracks, and a viral YouTube video has been removed as well – but 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 royalties, but the Stick Figure team argues that these tracks are remixes that do not properly credit or compensate the band. “It’s basically a game of whack-a-mole,” says Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Records, which operates Stick Figure.
Over the past few years, the ever-escalating onslaught of AI-generated music has disrupted the music industry. According to French streaming service Deezer, the amount of AI songs it detects daily has jumped from 18% in 2025 to 44% in 2026, or more than 2 million songs per month. It is estimated that 85 percent of these funnels are fraudulent, created specifically to withdraw royalties. Meanwhile, there are companies offering AI-powered song remix tools, making it easier to mass-produce alternative versions of songs.
People have been enjoying unauthorized remixes for a very long time. In the early 2000s, as mashups exploded in popularity, artists grappled with how to handle unauthorized releases of their works, such as when the Beatles and Jay-Z had to decide how to handle Danger Mouse. Gray albumwhich tied their albums together. The record company EMI, which owned the Beatles’ vocal recordings, issued a cease and desist, turning the technically bootleg album into an underground sensation. “In the age of TikTok, we’re constantly seeing songs blow up that have nothing to do with the artist, or are a remix that the artist didn’t make,” says Chris Dalla Riva, a data analyst and musician.
Dalla Riva sees what happened with RandB artist Steve Lacy’s 2022 song “Bad Habit” as a clear precursor to the Stick Figure dilemma. It really became a hit when people started uploading quick remixes to TikTok; These unauthorized releases of Chipmunks proved so popular that Lacy’s record label convinced him to release an official track to capitalize on the trend.
