Requests have doubled since March 2026; targets include Styles, Adele, Spears, Queen, Jackson.

Sony Music has announced that it has asked various streaming platforms to remove more than 260,000 AI-generated tracks that impersonate its artists.

According to the Financial Times (FT) the requests had been filed by the end of September. That is nearly double the 135,000 tracks that Sony had flagged by the end of March. Over six months, that works out to an average of more than 20,000 requests a month.

According to the FT, the fakes have targeted Sony acts including Harry Styles, Adele, Britney Spears, Queen and Michael Jackson. Sony has called the problem “generative AI deepfake tracks that imitate our artists’ voices and likenesses without permission.” It said the practice is “happening at scale, harms artists, misleads fans and undermines the ethical use of AI… We will keep enforcing our artists’ rights and expect platforms to act quickly and to prevent the same content from reappearing… But it’s becoming an uphill struggle,” the label told the FT.

A caveat in counting illegal songs

The announced number counts requests, not confirmed removals. The FT did not report how many tracks platforms actually took down, how fast they acted or which services got the notices.

Sony’s public totals have risen quickly. In November 2023, Dennis Kooker, Sony Music’s president of global digital business, had told a US Senate AI forum that the firm had sent “close to 10,000 takedowns.” He said platforms used “loopholes in the law as an excuse to drag their feet.” Sony’s submission to a UK government copyright consultation put the figure at more than 75,000 by March 2025. In March 2026, the BBC reported that the total had passed 135,000.

“The problem with deepfakes is they are demand-driven,” Kooker said in May. He added that they appear when “an artist is in cycle and is out there promoting their music.”

The deepfakes are part of a wider streaming-fraud problem. The FT reported that fraudsters use AI to mass-produce tracks and then use bots to stream them for royalties. Label executives estimate the fraud could cost the industry up to US$2.2bn a year. Kooker has said 5% to 10% of streams could be fraudulent, though “no one knows exactly.”

Sony, Universal and Warner had backed the IFPI’s Streaming Integrity Initiative, which launched in September. In September 2025, Spotify had brought in a vocal impersonation policy. In March 2026, it had begun testing an opt-in Artist Profile Protection feature.