Jason Moran has played the Kennedy Center as its artistic director for jazz, the Village Vanguard, the Whitney, and the soundtrack of Selma. What he has never done, by his own account, is release a five-track indie-pop EP called For You. A musician friend texted him in early March to say otherwise. He looked at his own Spotify page and found the record sitting there, attached to his verified profile. "There's not even a piano player on this whole damn record," Moran told The Guardian in Adrian Horton's 11 April dispatch. It took Spotify about seventy-two hours to pull it. By then the EP had been streaming for roughly ten days. There is no public figure for how many plays it accumulated, where those royalties were routed, or whether the distributor has ever been named. That is not an oversight. That is the design.

The catalogue is a quarter-billion tracks deep. The moderation desk is a form.

Music Business Worldwide reported last month that the total catalogue across major streaming services has passed 250 million tracks. Spotify's own Loud & Clear 2026 report, published 11 March, says it paid out $11 billion in royalties in 2025 — the largest single-year payout any music retailer has ever delivered. Half of that, per the same report, went to independent artists and labels. Thirteen thousand eight hundred artists cleared $100,000. Fifteen hundred cleared $1 million. That is the headline. What the company did not headline: those 13,800 artists are roughly 0.13 percent of the eleven million people who have uploaded at least one song. Everybody else is the catalogue. In a pooled royalty system, the catalogue is where fraud lives — every fake stream is a real dollar diverted from the pool that would otherwise have been paid to someone with a piano.

That is not rhetorical. It is the prosecutorial theory of United States v. Smith, the first criminal case the Department of Justice has ever brought against a streaming fraudster. Michael Smith, 54, of North Carolina, pleaded guilty on 19 March to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Per the Southern District of New York and Music Business Worldwide the same day, Smith generated roughly 661,440 streams per day at peak, using "hundreds of thousands" of AI tracks and a bot farm big enough to drive "billions" of plays across Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. He forfeited $8,091,843.64. US Attorney Jay Clayton put it in a sentence the platforms cannot un-hear: "Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real." Sentencing is 29 July.

The platforms caught him only after The MLC — the non-profit that administers mechanical royalties under the 2018 Music Modernization Act — flagged it. A non-profit with a headcount you can fit in a conference room did the work the three biggest consumer-tech companies on Earth declined to do with their own catalogues.

The jazz impersonation wave is not collateral damage. It is load-bearing.

Between 28 February and the second week of April, a specific pattern tore through jazz Spotify. Ted Gioia — a music historian whose The History of Jazz has been required reading at Berklee for twenty-eight years — catalogued the raid in two Honest Broker dispatches. The named victims, as of his 9 March count: Marc Johnson, Jazzmeia Horn, the long-dead Abbey Lincoln, Holly Cole, Gretchen Parlato, Bud Shank, Nnenna Freelon, Benny Green, the recently deceased Freddy Cole, and Nat Adderley. One listener's feed Gioia audited had nine AI fakes inside a single sixty-five-track session — a 14 percent fraud rate on a curated feed. The Guardian's 11 April piece added Antonio Hart, drummer Nate Smith, the Melbourne band Hiatus Kaiyote, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Danish pianist Carsten Dahl to the ledger.

Benny Green's case is the clearest stress test of what Spotify claims its moderation is. Somebody uploaded an EP purporting to be a Benny Green–Freddy Cole collaboration — a living sixty-two-year-old pianist and a singer who died in 2020. Green confirmed to Gioia it was a forgery. His manager asked Spotify to remove it. A week later it was still streaming. For a dead artist response time is measured in never, unless the estate happens to run a Spotify for Artists account — a precondition that would have struck Billie Holiday as eccentric.

The Australian precedent is the one the platforms have had the longest to learn from and have refused to. Paul Bender of Hiatus Kaiyote discovered four AI-generated tracks attached to the Spotify profile of his side project The Sweet Enoughs in mid-2025. As he told the ABC on 16 June, the process of getting them removed — from Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer and YouTube Music — took more than eight weeks. "It took weeks for the first track to come down," Bender wrote in the open letter that, by October 2025, had Chaka Khan, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Genesis Owusu, The Teskey Brothers and Kimbra on it, "and after it did, another immediately went up." The Velvet Sundown, a fully synthetic act whose own bio later confessed to being "composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence," hit one million monthly listeners on Spotify between 5 June and early July 2025 on the strength of two albums — Floating On Echoes and Dust And Silence — that had existed for less than two months.

That money comes out of a pooled pot. Every dollar that flows to a Velvet Sundown is a dollar that does not flow to the Sweet Enoughs.

"Artist Profile Protection" is the fire-drill, not the fire code

Faced with a crisis that has been in the Music Business Worldwide archive since 2023, Spotify on 24 March launched a beta feature called Artist Profile Protection. The design, per the Spotify for Artists blog post that day: artists opt in, receive an email when a release is delivered under their name, and can approve or reject it before it goes live.

Read that back slowly. In 2026, the largest music platform on Earth has announced, in beta, that an artist can now be notified when a stranger tries to upload a record under their name, provided the artist has signed up to the Spotify for Artists dashboard, and provided the platform's metadata-matching correctly identifies the upload as a candidate. Moran does not put his music on Spotify at all. Billie Holiday is not available to opt in. The framework is self-parodying: the artist is now the moderation cost centre, running quality assurance on an infrastructure whose owner collects the subscription revenue either way.

The company has also removed, by its own September 2025 disclosure, "more than 75 million spammy tracks" in the preceding year. Presented as a triumph. Divided against a 250-million-track catalogue, it is a 30 percent churn rate — a tacit admission that three out of every ten files on the service during the year were garbage. It does not tell you how much of that garbage was paid out before the takedown. Nobody's audit committee has asked.

Follow the royalty pool

Here is the economic cold line. Spotify operates a "pro-rata" royalty model: every subscriber's and advertiser's dollar is pooled, and payouts go by share of total streams. That formula was designed for a world in which streams were scarce. In a world of AI-generated slop produced at zero marginal cost, pro-rata is a subsidy scheme for the people uploading the slop — and a tax on every working musician whose share of the pool shrinks each time a million Velvet Sundown streams fire or a bot farm spins up.

Industry insiders quoted in the same Guardian piece estimate 5 to 10 percent of all streams across the major platforms are fraudulent, a drain on legitimate artists they put at up to $2 billion a year. That is roughly one fifth of Spotify's entire 2025 payout. Set against the company's celebratory framing — "the most global and diverse music industry in history," per Spotify's 11 March press release — the honest read is that one in every five or ten royalty dollars the headline is built on is stolen before it arrives.

What the Michael Smith plea demonstrated is that when a prosecutor with subpoena power walks in, the stream numbers come apart in weeks. What Artist Profile Protection demonstrates is that when a platform is asked to walk in voluntarily, it builds a beta dashboard and hands the mop to the artists. There is a word for the structure this produces, and it is not "the most diverse music industry in history." It is rent extraction dressed as a catalogue.

The question for April 2026 is not whether Spotify can fix the hijacking. It cannot, at current margins, without rebuilding the upload pipeline, the royalty formula, or both. The question is whether the trade press, the rights-holder coalitions and — at some point — a European Commission culture directorate will name the business model for what it is. The EP called For You was not a glitch. It was a product, functioning exactly as designed, until a jazz pianist opened his phone and noticed there was not even a piano player on the whole damn record.

Sources

• Adrian Horton, "'It has your name on it, but I don't think it's you': how AI is impersonating musicians on Spotify," The Guardian, 11 April 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/apr/11/ai-music-impersonation-spotify
• "Spotify AI Hijacking Crisis Intensifies as Jazz Musicians Targeted," Digital Music News, 14 April 2026. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/04/14/spotify-ai-hijacking-artist-profiles-continues/
• Ted Gioia, "Is Spotify Enabling Massive Impersonation of Famous Jazz Musicians?" The Honest Broker, 9 March 2026. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-spotify-enabling-massive-impersonation
• "Streaming fraud man who pocketed $8m using hundreds of thousands of AI songs streamed billions of times by bots pleads guilty," Music Business Worldwide, 19 March 2026. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/streaming-fraud-man-who-pocketed-8m-using-hundreds-of-thousands-of-ai-songs-streamed-billions-of-times-by-bots-pleads-guilty/
• "The AI music problem on Spotify (and other streaming platforms) is worse than you think," Music Business Worldwide, 30 June 2025. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-ai-music-problem-on-spotify-and-other-streaming-platforms-is-worse-than-you-think/
• "As Spotify Turns 20, the Most Global and Diverse Music Industry in History Has Taken Shape," Spotify Newsroom, 11 March 2026. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-03-11/loud-and-clear-music-economics-highlights/
• "Introducing Artist Profile Protection: Giving Artists More Control Over What Shows Up Under Their Name," Spotify for Artists blog, 24 March 2026. https://artists.spotify.com/blog/introducing-artist-profile-protection
• "Spotify Targets Fake AI Uploads With 'Artist Profile Protection' Beta," Digital Music News, 24 March 2026. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/03/24/spotify-artist-profile-protection/
• "Hiatus Kaiyote, Genesis Owusu, King Gizzard and More Sign Petition Against Fraudulent AI-Generated Music Uploads," Rolling Stone AU, 14 October 2025. https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/hiatus-kaiyote-genesis-owusu-king-gizzard-more-sign-petition-against-ai-generated-music-uploads-85683/
• "'Laughable': Aussie artist says scammers flooding Spotify with AI fakes," ABC News, 16 June 2025. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-16/spotify-ai-music-streaming-fraud-sweet-enoughs-paul-bender/105408242
• "The 2025 Royalty Numbers are in: Loud & Clear Updated with new Data & Takeaways," Music Ally, 2 April 2026. https://musically.com/2026/04/02/the-2025-royalty-numbers-are-in-loud-clear-updated-with-new-data-takeaways/
• "The Velvet Sundown explained: What's behind the Spotify-verified AI band controversy?" Euronews Culture, 8 July 2025. https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/07/08/the-velvet-sundown-explained-whats-behind-the-spotify-verified-ai-band-controversy