In April 2023, an anonymous creator known as Ghostwriter released “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song with AI-generated vocals made to sound like the rappers Drake and The Weeknd. Neither artist had any involvement. Posted to TikTok and major streaming services, it racked up millions of plays within days and became the clearest mainstream demonstration that anyone could now fake a famous voice convincingly.
Universal Music Group, which represents both artists, moved quickly. It issued takedown notices, and the track was pulled from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and other platforms within roughly two weeks of release. A brief, confusing period followed in which the song was reported to be eligible for Grammy consideration. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. shut that down in a September 2023 statement, saying that even though the song “was written by a human creator, the vocals were not legally obtained, the vocals were not cleared by the label or the artists, and the song is not commercially available, and because of that … it’s not eligible.”
The case crystallized a legal gray area: the melody and lyrics were human-written, but the vocal likeness was synthesized, raising right-of-publicity and voice-cloning questions that existing copyright law did not cleanly address.
Why business readers should care: a single anonymous upload pushed a major label and an awards body into emergency policy decisions, showing how fast voice-cloning can outrun the contracts, clearances, and eligibility rules that the entertainment economy runs on.