This Reggae Group Is In A Fierce Battle Against AI Slop Remixes

Reggae from California group Stick Figure has been around for 20 years, eight albums, and countless hours on the road, but singer and guitarist Scott Woodruff has never seen a song soar like “Angels Above Me” did last week.

A six-year-old song hit number one on iTunes The sales chart in six countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, and Canada, is rising “absurdly,” according to Woodruff.

Stick Figure has had many interesting events in the past, with albums repeatedly hit number one in the reggae group, it’s a hit with hundreds of millions of plays. But the speed with which the song went from a one-year-old to a smash was new. People were posting TikToks about it, overflowing with interest. “It was fun,” Woodruff says. “But as soon as I found out that it was because of a brand that was stolen and made only once, I mean that’s sad.”

Stick Figure deals with the challenges of today’s modern business: It has good music – but most of the drama is interesting and the unauthorized, robotic adaptations that the group and its suspect team have created with support for artificial intelligence tools. The single remix got over 1.8 million plays on YouTube in five days. “Right now, four types are spreading,” says Woodruff. They are not getting paid for any of them.

The band has struggled to get these songs off the ground, with varying degrees of success. As the mix has been increasing over the last week, the Stick Figure team has been proactively sending out takedown notices and contacting all those who refresh them, all the way down to the account owners who post the mixes. Some songs were pulled – Spotify has taken down all requested songs, and a viral YouTube video has also been removed – but others remain. When contacted by the label, one of the purists of the remix insisted that the song was a cover and offered to share some of it as a courtesy, but the Stick Figure team sees the tracks as remixes that do not pay the bill or pay the band. “It’s a whack-a-mole game,” says Adam Gross, the group’s president, Ineffable Records.

In the last few years, more and more attacks about Music created by AI it has disrupted the music industry. According to the French streaming service Deezer, the number of AI songs it receives every day has increased from 18 percent in 2025 to 44 percent in 2026, or more than 2 million songs per month. It estimates that 85 percent of the railroad is fraudulent—downgrades designed to make money. Currently, there are companies that provide it AI remix music toolsmaking it easy to produce ersatz music on a large scale.

People have been looking for illegal remixes for a long time. In the early 2000s, when mashups became more popular, artists struggled with how to use illegal versions of their work, like when the Beatles and Jay-Z had to decide how to approach Danger Mouse. Gray albumwho put their albums together. The recording studio EMI, which contained the Beatles’ recordings, issued a ban-and-denial, turning the album into a technically illegal one. a secret feeling. “In the age of TikTok, we’re seeing music that’s just getting bigger, and it’s not related to the artist, or it’s a remix that the artist didn’t make,” said Chris Dalla Riva, an analyst and musician.

Dalla Riva sees the incident with R&B artist Steve Lacy’s 2022 song “Bad Habit” as a precursor to the Stick Figure crisis. It was already a hit when people started uploading fast remixes to TikTok; These illegal chipmunky versions became so popular that Lacy’s writings he satisfied him to release an official song to capitalize on the trend.