This Reggae Group Faces a Dreadful Struggle Against AI Mashup Disasters

The reggae band Stick Figure, hailing from California, has celebrated 20 years together, eight albums, and countless performances. However, lead vocalist and guitarist Scott Woodruff has recently experienced unprecedented success with the track “Angels Above Me,” which skyrocketed this past week.

Originally released seven years ago, the song reached number one on the iTunes sales charts across six different countries, including the UK, Austria, and Canada, making a surprising leap into prominence, as noted by Woodruff.

While Stick Figure has achieved numerous notable milestones, with multiple albums topping the reggae charts and singles accumulating hundreds of millions of streams, the rapid rise of this particular track was uncharted territory. Fans flooded TikTok with enthusiastic posts about it. “It was exhilarating,” Woodruff mentions. “But discovering it was due to a click-generated version that was essentially copied—I find that disheartening.”

The band is facing a significant modern dilemma in the music industry: they have a hit song, yet a majority of the views and interest are linked to unauthorized, automated remixes created with artificial intelligence. One such remix gained over 1.8 million views on YouTube within just five days. “Currently, four different renditions are gaining traction,” Woodruff shares. He isn’t receiving royalties from any of them.

Stick Figure’s management is actively working to take down these unauthorized tracks, with mixed results. As remixes gained traction over the past week, the team has hurriedly sent copyright takedown notices and contacted major streaming platforms, even reaching out directly to individual remix creators. Some tracks have been removed—Spotify complied with all takedown requests, and that viral video on YouTube has also been taken down—though others remain available. When approached by the management, one remix creator claimed the track was a cover and offered to share royalties, yet the Stick Figure team believes these are remixes lacking proper credit and compensation. “It’s essentially a game of whack-a-mole,” says Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Records, which oversees Stick Figure.

In recent years, the surge of AI-generated music has created disruption in the music industry. The French streaming service Deezer reports that the daily detection of AI songs has increased from 18 percent in 2025 to 44 percent in 2026, translating to over 2 million tracks each month. They estimate that 85 percent of these tracks are fraudulent—produced specifically to exploit royalty streams. Additionally, various companies now offer AI remix tools, simplifying the creation of imitation versions of popular songs on a large scale.

Unauthorized remixes have been enjoyed by listeners for many years. Back in the early 2000s, the rise of mashups prompted artists to confront unauthorized adaptations of their work, much like the dilemma faced by the Beatles and Jay-Z regarding Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which combined their albums. The record label EMI, holding the Beatles’ sound recordings, issued cease-and-desist orders, turning the technically illicit album into an underground success. “In today’s TikTok era, we frequently see songs gaining attention that have no relation to the original artist, or surface as remixes made by others,” remarks Chris Dalla Riva, a data analyst and musician.

Dalla Riva likens Stick Figure’s situation to that of R&B artist Steve Lacy’s 2022 hit “Bad Habit.” While already successful, it wasn’t until sped-up remixes surfaced on TikTok that the track gained additional momentum; these unauthorized versions became so popular that Lacy’s record label persuaded him to release an official remix capitalizing on the trend.