Someone is releasing AI music as Red Dead Redemption composer Bill Elm

Red Dead Redemption composer Bill Elm has confirmed what fans have suspected over the past few months: that the music released under his name on popular streaming services is not his work.

I was fortunate enough to chat with Bill Elm recently to dig into his memorable contribution to 2010’s Red Dead Redemption. I learned a lot (to be shared at a later date), but I was particularly shocked to learn that tunes on his Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal accounts released within the past year have nothing to do with Bill.

In fact, the musician believes that the “compositions” have been generated using AI.

Bill told me: “I record a little bit on my own. Funny thing with, with, say, ‘Bill Elm’ on the streaming services, is somebody’s releasing AI Western music under my name, and and I can’t even release my own stuff under my name, because I’m locked out of the artist pages.”

“It really bothers me.”

Even the most cursory exploration of this finds that Bill’s fears are probably well founded. I’ve found his Apple Music page lists a series of tracks that are accompanied by what I consider to be obviously AI artwork.

Meanwhile, the seeming use of AI has been discussed on Reddit, with a screenshot quote from Bill in one notable post.

The “tunes” are also available on YouTube. I used the URL for one of these (“The Deadlands”) with an AI checker.

It determined that a hybrid human + AI approach was used to generate the track, with “Strong AI characteristics detected.” This indicates the use of something called “neural-network audio generation” — a generative AI technique.

There is another element to this—that fans might draw the conclusion that Bill Elm himself is creating music with AI. This is not the case, and I found Bill to be clearly frustrated by the whole thing.

Bill has considered challenging the attribution but feels out of options: “I mean, who do you call when it’s AI?”

For now, Bill Elm remains locked out of his own Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify accounts. Hopefully, with fans now increasingly aware of what has happened, the platforms can put that right.

When that happens, Bill Elm can get back to releasing his own music under his own name.

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