'Heart on My Sleeve' AI Drake/Weeknd song goes viral, then pulled from streaming
Released 4 April 2023 by the anonymous TikTok account Ghostwriter977, the track reached about 600,000 Spotify streams and 15 million TikTok views before Universal Music Group had it pulled.
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An anonymous TikTok account, Ghostwriter977, released “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song built around AI-cloned vocals made to sound like Drake and the Weeknd, on 4 April 2023. Within two weeks it had gathered around 600,000 streams on Spotify, hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, and roughly 15 million views on TikTok, drawing coverage well beyond the usual audience for AI demos.
Universal Music Group, the label that represents both artists, filed takedown notices with the major platforms, arguing the song infringed the rights of the artists it imitated. Spotify and Apple Music removed the track first, and YouTube, Amazon, SoundCloud, Tidal, Deezer and TikTok followed within a day or two. UMG framed the removal as a matter of principle beyond a single song, saying platforms had “a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists,” and casting the choice as one between supporting artists and permitting “deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation.”
The case sat awkwardly within existing law. Voice, unlike a musical composition or recording, is not clearly copyrightable in the way UMG’s takedown notices implied, and Ghostwriter977’s underlying lyrics, melody and production were original; the strongest legal claims available to Drake and the Weeknd were closer to name-and-likeness or right-of-publicity theories than copyright infringement, an ambiguity commentators noted at the time. Recording Academy chief executive Harvey Mason Jr reportedly reached out to Ghostwriter977 after the track’s release, an interaction some outlets read as an opening toward Grammy eligibility, though the song was not entered for the award.
The episode became a reference point in the following two years’ arguments over AI voice cloning, cited repeatedly by record labels and artists pressing for federal legislation — including the proposed NO FAKES Act — aimed specifically at unauthorised AI-generated voice and likeness.