A fake artist took 94% of Makeshift Hammer's Spotify royalties with a sped-up copy of their own album

A fake artist named Carey Dupont took 94% of the Spotify royalties earned by Philadelphia folk duo Makeshift Hammer, using an album of the band’s own songs at altered speed. Band member Owen Lyman-Schmidt told the story in Philadelphia Magazine on July 10, 2026, and Digital Music News picked it up two days later.

The discovery came from a fan, not a fraud filter. A longtime listener messaged Lyman-Schmidt about an album called Blue Road, credited to an artist he’d never heard of, sounding like Makeshift Hammer “distorted a bit.”

The clone barely bothered to hide. The track titles were the band’s own with a word shaved off: “All My Friend” instead of “All My Friends,” “Banker and a Liar” instead of “Bankers and Liars.” The recordings were the band’s actual masters, sped up or slowed down, with AI-generated cover art on top. Carey Dupont had no website, no social media, and no other releases.

The fake outperformed the original by a wide margin. In the year before discovery, the Blue Road tracks collected close to 50,000 listens each. Many of the originals sat between 1,000 and 2,000, despite a 4-year head start.

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Someone was using our music to play the streaming game and was massively outperforming us.

Why a sped-up copy slipped past Spotify’s fraud systems

The scam needed no music generation at all. A speed change alters a recording’s audio fingerprint enough to break exact-match detection, and the fingerprint is what fraud detection systems compare. AI’s only job here was the cover art.

Small catalogs carry a second weakness: they often sit outside the audio content recognition databases distributors use to flag copies. Folk musician Murphy Campbell hit the same gap in April, when a copyright troll claimed her recordings because her songs were never fingerprinted. Spotify’s impersonation policy targets profile hijacks like the Bridgit Mendler fake EP. A clone under a brand-new name touches none of those tripwires.

What the Carey Dupont clone means for independent artists

Ask your distributor whether your catalog is registered with audio content recognition services, and get it registered if the answer is unclear. Registration is what turns “someone stole my album” from a support ticket into an enforceable claim.

Your audience is a detection layer no platform offers. The tip came from a fan who knew the songs well enough to hear the distortion, which is one more argument for owning a direct line to your listeners. Spotify’s fraud crackdown works the aggregate. Nobody at the platform is listening for your record specifically.