Sony's 260,000 Deepfake Takedowns Are a Warning, Not a Win

If you run a roster, manage a catalog, or sit on a rights desk, you already know the drill. A fake track surfaces with your artist's voice, you file a notice, the platform pulls it down, and three more appear by Friday. It is tedious, expensive, and it never ends. The question you have probably been avoiding is simple: can you ever actually win this way?

The biggest record company on earth just answered. Not with a strategy memo, but with a number and a confession.

Sony Music has now asked digital platforms to remove more than 260,000 AI-generated tracks impersonating its artists, Music Business Worldwide reported, citing figures the label gave the Financial Times on October 5. That is almost double the 135,000 it had filed by the end of March. Roughly six months. Nearly twice the volume.

Then came the line that matters more than the number. "We will keep enforcing our artists' rights and expect platforms to act quickly and to prevent the same content from reappearing," Sony told the Financial Times. "But it's becoming an uphill struggle."

Read that again. This is Sony, with its lawyers, its enforcement teams, and its global clout, publicly conceding that the approach is losing ground even as it pours more resources into it.

Watch the curve, not the headline

The trajectory is the tell. Sony Music exec Dennis Kooker disclosed "close to 10,000" takedowns at a Senate AI forum in November 2023, MBW noted. By March 2025 it was more than 75,000. By March 2026, 135,000. Now 260,000.

Slice it the way MBW did and you get over 20,000 takedown requests per month across the second and third quarters of this year. The affected roster reads like a hall of fame: Harry Styles, Adele, Britney Spears, Queen, and Michael Jackson, the FT reported.

Here is what should keep executives up at night. The volume is not plateauing. It is accelerating. And Sony's own framing explains why. Kooker described deepfakes in March as "a demand-driven event," per the BBC via MBW, built on the back of real artists who are out there promoting their work. The more an artist matters, the bigger the target.

What the numbers conveniently leave out

Give Sony credit for transparency, then read the gaps. The FT did not report how many of those 260,000 tracks platforms actually removed, how fast they moved, or which services received the requests, as MBW pointed out.

So the 260,000 is a measure of effort, not outcome. It tells you how hard Sony is paddling. It does not tell you whether the boat is moving forward. And the company's own "uphill struggle" admission strongly implies the answer.

Note too that Sony's published tallies do not separate the two distinct problems Spotify's impersonation rules split apart: unauthorized AI voice clones on one hand, and fraudulent delivery of music to another artist's profile on the other. Different mechanics, different fixes, lumped into one scary headline.

Why reactive enforcement was always going to lose

DMCA-style takedowns were built for a world where making infringing content took effort. Generative AI removed that friction. A single person can now produce more fake tracks in an afternoon than a label's enforcement team can review in a week. The cost to attack dropped to near zero. The cost to defend did not.

That asymmetry is the whole ballgame. You cannot whack enough moles when the mole machine runs on a laptop. Sony knows this, which is exactly why it released the number. The company wants policymakers to feel the scale and act.

The structural fixes are already taking shape around the edges. In the US, the NO FAKES Act, which MBW reported defines a digital replica as a "highly realistic" computer-generated version of someone's voice or likeness, has been reintroduced after Music Ally noted it ran out of legislative time before the 2024 US elections. Artists are hedging on their own, filing voice trademarks: Taylor Swift in April, followed by Lionel Richie and the Backstreet Boys in June.

The takeaway for your desk

The grinding day-to-day of spotting fakes and filing notices still falls on labels and management teams, depending on who holds the rights. That is not changing tomorrow. But stop treating takedown volume as a win metric. It is a cost line that scales with the problem, not against it.

The real leverage sits upstream: platform-level detection that blocks uploads before they go live, licensing frameworks that give AI a legal lane, and legislation like NO FAKES that puts real teeth behind a cease-and-desist. Everything downstream of that is paddling.

When the largest label in the business tells you the hill is getting steeper while it climbs faster than ever, believe the hill, not the climb.

Sources

• Music Ally
• Music Business Worldwide
• Financial Times