A fake AI single hit Gemma Hayes' Spotify and Apple Music profiles, and 3 days later Apple still lists it

Gemma Hayes has a new single out, and she didn’t make it. A 3-song release called “Taxi to Piccadilly” landed on the Irish singer-songwriter’s official Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube profiles on Sunday, October 25, 2026.

Hayes found out the next day. “There was new music from me, which was not me,” she told The Irish Times. Her management contacted each service separately, and none of them had taken the songs down by the time the piece ran on Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning, October 28, I checked Apple Music in Ireland, the UK and the US. The fake single was still there in all 3, listed as her latest release.

What the fake ‘Taxi to Piccadilly’ single looks like on Gemma Hayes’ Apple Music profile

The Apple Music page lists 3 tracks: “Taxi to Piccadilly”, “Champagne and Cheap Perfume” and “Melancholy in Stereo”. Each one runs between 2:39 and 2:43. The genre tag says Britpop, and the label line reads “℗ 2026 Planet Music”.

Her real records carry her own imprint. Blind Faith, her 2024 album, reads “℗ 2024 Gemma Hayes Music” on the same service.

The fakes have also climbed into her Top Songs. “Taxi to Piccadilly” and “Champagne and Cheap Perfume” sit in that row next to “Hardwired” and “Making My Way Back”, so anyone who opens her profile today hits them first.

Hayes says the uploader appears to be an Indonesian entity, credited on the tracks as Composer & Lyricist, which is where most of the royalties would go. The credits also list her as playing drums, jazz horn and pedal steel guitar.

She says the songs were built to pass a casual listen: “It’s got drums, bass, electric guitar, a female vocal. They are all things I have on my tracks.” Her verdict: “bland, generic, soulless music.”

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There's no standard protocol for this. I don't know where to go, how to stop it from happening again. I feel like the guinea pig.

Why fake releases keep landing on profiles like Gemma Hayes’

Nobody hacked her account. Her manager told her it has nothing to do with the password. “Basically it fools the platform,” Hayes said. “It says ‘Gemma Hayes, new music’, it can fool through AI, and it gets tucked in under my profile.”

So someone uploads tracks through a distributor with her name in the artist field, and the services match that name to the page that already exists. That’s how a fake EP sat on Bridgit Mendler’s profiles for a week in June, and how AI tracks landed on dead jazz musicians’ pages in September.

Hayes has around 200,000 streams a month on Spotify, which puts her in the mid-tier the Irish Times says these uploaders favour. “They avoid major artists because they usually have the software to block this,” she said. “I don’t have the software.”

Spotify’s answer is Artist Profile Protection, which lets an artist approve or decline a release before it shows up on their page. It’s still an opt-in beta.

Spotify said this month it will open it to all artists by the end of 2026. Apple Music doesn’t offer an equivalent review step at all.

Until then, the route is the one in the diagram. Search your own name on every service, report the release through Spotify’s content mismatch process and YouTube’s complaint form, and get your distributor to file the formal takedown.

Hayes is working on an acoustic album she wants out in the new year. When it lands, it’ll go up on the same profile that’s carrying “Taxi to Piccadilly” today.