Sony Music says the scale of unauthorized AI-generated music impersonating its artists is continuing to grow. By the end of September, the company had asked digital platforms to remove more than 260,000 tracks that it says imitate the voices or likenesses of artists including Harry Styles, Adele and Michael Jackson. That is nearly double the approximately 135,000 tracks Sony had targeted by the end of March. The figure represents takedown requests submitted by Sony, not a verified count of tracks ultimately removed by streaming services.

The increase highlights a separate AI challenge from the copyright disputes over model training. Even when a generated recording does not copy a specific song, the use of an artist’s recognizable voice, identity or likeness can create questions around authorization, consumer confusion and who should control the commercial value of an artist’s identity. There is also a significant royalty-reconciliation problem that can occur in practice. By the time unauthorized tracks are identified and removed, usage may have already been reported and royalties may already have moved through streaming, distribution and royalty-accounting systems. Removing a track does not automatically unwind those transactions. Identifying the affected usage, tracing where payments went, determining which rightsholders may have been economically harmed and ultimately recovering or reallocating money can be extremely difficult—particularly across hundreds of thousands of tracks. That makes the problem larger than takedowns alone: AI-generated impersonations can be created and distributed faster than rightsholders can identify them, while correcting the financial impact after the fact can be considerably harder. As AI music tools improve, the industry may increasingly need stronger provenance, identity verification and platform-level controls that prevent unauthorized content from entering the royalty system in the first place.