“Heart on My Sleeve,” TikTok creator Ghostwriter’s recent AI-generated riff on the Weeknd and Drake, understandably upped the ante of angst in the music industry. It threw off vibes of the original, “bad” Napster that pillaged musicians and decimated the music business back in the day.
Here we go again, more than two decades later. Spotify and other streaming services took down the “Fake Drake” track. But “Heart on My Sleeve” still proliferates across the Internet. And if there’s one thing we learned from bad Napster, whac-a-mole take-down and litigation strategies can’t turn back the clock on disruptive new technologies. Only open-minded acceptance and innovation can.