I came across this and thought it was worth sharing:

Their Songs Were Stolen by Phantom Artists. They Couldn’t Get Them Back.

If you don't have a subscription or if you want the TL;DR version, a couple of lawyer/musician hybrids tried to publish a CD and discovered that someone had:


  • stolen their music off of SoundCloud
  • re-named and re-attributed each song
  • used some sort of music distributor (I imagine something along the lines of DistroKid) to distribute the stolen music
  • used stolen streaming platform credentials to generate "listens" and some revenue


It's all being done at scale, and it sounds like it's not enough revenue to draw careful attention from the streaming platforms. Pretty much every entity in the article said "not it," and, if these two weren't lawyers, one an IP guy and the other a retired internet copyright specialist, they might have been entirely SOL.