Clout-Chasing DJs Are Faking Co-Signs by Dubbing Over Crowd Videos. Will Labels Bite?

deadmau5 and Chainsmokers weigh in on EDM’s most insidious new trend Attention Fraud Clout-Chasing DJs Are Faking Co-Signs by Dubbing Over Crowd Videos. Will Labels Bite? deadmau5 and Chainsmokers weigh in on EDM’s most insidious new trend By Michaelangelo Matos Michaelangelo Matos Kaytranada’s ‘Ain’t No Damn Way’ Is an Airy Amble Through Dance Music History Sly Stone in 1967 — Ready to Take Over the World A Quiet Night With DJ Koze View all posts by Michaelangelo Matos March 2, 2026 Deadmau5 performs onstage during his 'Retro5pective: 25 Years Of deadmau5' tour at Brooklyn Mirage on May 03, 2024 in Brooklyn, New York. Santiago Felipe/Getty Images Dance music has had a rough go of it in recent months — from clubs shuttering en masse to event cancellations due to goon-squad invasions of American cities. Now, a new test of the DJ ecosystem has reared its insidious head: the clout deepfake. This disturbing trend has taken on a couple of forms — so far. The first is the simplest: namely, fledgling dance producers have been hijacking footage of big-name DJs playing to jumping crowds, overdubbing their own music onto it, sharing it to their socials, claiming clout that doesn’t actually exist, and fooling fans and potentially even record labels in the process. It bubbled to the surface in early January, when Alex Pall of the Chainsmokers posted a note on LinkedIn that set off a fusillade of responses. He called the trend “kind of genius, kind of dishonest, but just really interesting to watch play out.” Pall continued: “[T]o the average viewer, it feels like the song … [is] blowing up, getting played out, building momentum. But it’s not real … It’s just someone pasting their song over a clip and letting the internet fill in the rest … And the wild part is how well it works … If it’s that easy to fake momentum, then what does ‘support’ even mean anymore?” (Pall declined Rolling Stone’s request for further comment.) If that weren’t bad enough, the clout deepfake has been upped to another level. On Facebook on Feb. 11, deadmau5 wrote a note in his typically no-holds-barred style that said, in part: “WELL, IT HAPPENED. [sic] Woke up to some idiot DJ’s Instagram story … that depicted me standing there promoting him and his music. FULLY AI generated, voice wasn’t quite 100% but pretty damn convincing … I’m sure we’re all going to be seeing much more of this.” Reached on tour in South America, deadmau5 confirmed that the producer behind this AI double (whom he declined to name) was previously unknown to him: “He was a fan that came out of the woodwork.” He tells Rolling Stone that it’s the first time this has happened to him or anyone else he knows, but adds: “I wasn’t immediately aware but this is all not surprising. The technology is moving fast and people are jumping on the bandwagon. This was someone faking me … We need to be in control of our own faces, voices, music, output — what have you. Protections are necessary now more than ever.” Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century To that end, Dina Lapolt, deadmau5’s lawyer, is working on a bipartisan bill — cosigned by Senators Blackburn, Coons, Tillis, and Klobuchar and Representatives Salazar, Dean, Moran, and Balint — dubbed the NO FAKES Act of 2025 (it stands for Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe). In an email to Rolling Stone, Lapolt says the bill “would create a new intellectual property right in your voice and likeness — with real statutory protections, just like copyright and trademark. This isn’t just about celebrities. From athletes and entertainers to journalists to everyday Americans, deepfakes and voice clones can wreck careers, scam families, distort public discourse, and leave a trail of exploitation, humiliation, and real emotional harm across the internet. It’s time the law caught up with the technology.” But the technology keeps running away with the law. According to some seasoned onlookers, this type of thing has become almost inevitable — and reflective of larger changes in the music business in general, but around EDM in particular. Lawrence Jones of Mutual Friends, a U.K. management company, has watched the changes up close. “When I first started, which is about 2015, vertical video did not exist,” says Jones. “It was still horizontal.” Jones worked for a management company that got results by arranging interviews with online publications. Video, as he describes it, “was a kind of peppering on the top.” Today, Jones says, video is “80 percent of it, compared to maybe 15 to 20 percent of it beforehand. It quite literally has flipped