The fake Drake song gets purged

If you thought you stumbled on a surprise collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd this week, your ears were lying to you.

A viral track called Heart On My Sleeve blew up across streaming platforms over the past few days, sounding shockingly authentic. The twist? Neither artist had anything to do with it. An anonymous creator named Ghostwriter977 penned original lyrics and used AI software to mimic both superstar voices.

Streaming giants pull the plug

Before platforms began pulling the plug, the fake collab was racking up real numbers. The track clocked more than 625,000 plays on Spotify and over 275,000 views on YouTube before it was removed.

Universal Music Group (UMG), the label representing both stars, immediately went on the offensive. Over the course of 48 hours, the track was taken down from Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, and SoundCloud, though clips continued circulating on social apps like TikTok.

UMG didn't mince words, telling Music Business Worldwide that platforms face a choice: stand with artists and human creative expression, or stand with deepfakes and fraud. The label argued that distributors carry a clear legal and ethical duty to stop services from hurting musicians.

Neither Drake nor The Weeknd has commented directly on this latest drop. But Drake made his feelings pretty clear on Instagram recently after an AI generated him rapping Ice Spice's Munch (Feeling U), calling it the final straw.

The copyright mess behind the voice

While platforms took the song down under standard copyright requests, the legal ground beneath it is shaky. Under Section 230, platforms aren't liable for third-party uploads as long as they comply with takedown notices, but existing copyright laws never anticipated voice cloning.

Media attorney Edward Klaris noted to NBC that the entire industry is waiting on a court decision to clarify whether using copyrighted music as training data is actually illegal. A court could rule that synthesizing vocals is transformative fair use, or decide that copying an artist's signature sound from their catalog constitutes flat-out infringement.

Why it matters

This is a watershed moment for generative music. We've officially moved past amateur meme covers and into radio-ready hits that everyday listeners cannot tell apart from genuine studio releases. For creators, the technical barrier to cloning superstars has evaporated, but attempting to monetize or distribute that work on commercial streaming services right now is a guaranteed ticket to DMCA purgatory.

For the music business, UMG's aggressive move is a clear warning shot aimed straight at tech platforms. Labels are effectively demanding that Spotify, Apple, and YouTube build guardrails and treat unconsented vocal clones as piracy before their most valuable intellectual property—artist identity—gets diluted.

In our view, UMG is acting smart by drawing a hard line early, but their legal leverage looks fragile. Copyright protects specific recordings and compositions, not necessarily the timbre of a human voice. For now, major labels are relying on sheer corporate muscle and platform partnerships to scrub these tracks, but until courts definitively rule on whether training AI on copyrighted catalogs is infringement, this whack-a-mole game will only get messier.