A song which has been streamed millions of times in Sweden has been banned from that country’s music charts because it was created by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Called I know, You’re Not Mine – Jag vet, du är inte min – it is currently top of the Spotify playlist of Sweden’s most popular songs. But the singer is a digital creation, and the country’s music industry body has blocked the track from its official chart listings.
It’s a folk-pop song telling a melancholic story of lost love.
Backed by a finger-picked acoustic guitar melody, it weaves a tale of late-night heartbreak, broken promises and shattered hopes.
“Your steps in the night, I hear them go,” sings the artist known as Jacub in a haunting voice.
“We stood in the rain at your gate and ran out, and everything went fast. Now I know you are not mine, your promises came to nothing.”
It quickly became Sweden’s biggest song of 2026 so far, amassing more than five million Spotify streams in a matter of weeks, putting it at the top of the platform’s Swedish Top 50.
However, journalists who began investigating Jacub’s identity found that the artist had no significant social media profile, media appearances or tour dates.
When investigative journalist Emanuel Karlsten began digging deeper, he found that the song was registered to a group of executives connected to Stellar Music, a music publishing and marketing firm based in Denmark. Two of the individuals work in Stellar’s AI department.
The producers – calling themselves Team Jacub – issued a lengthy email to Karlsten, insisting their creative process had been misunderstood.
“We are not an anonymous tech company that just ‘pressed a button,’” they wrote.
“The team behind Jacub consists of experienced music creators, songwriters, and producers who have invested a lot of time, care, emotions, and financial resources.”
They described AI as a “tool” or an “assisting instrument” within a “human-controlled creative process”. To Team Jacub, they said, the five million Spotify streams were proof of the song’s “long-term artistic value.”
As to whether Jacub was a real person, Team Jacub gave a philosophical response.
“That depends on how you define the term,” they said.
“Jacub is an artistic project developed and carried by a team of human songwriters, producers, and creators. The feelings, stories, and experiences in the music are real, because they come from real people.”
That response has not impressed the IFPI Sweden music industry organisation, which has blocked the song from appearing in the country’s official national charts.
“Our rule is that if it is a song that is mainly AI-generated, it does not have the right to be on the top list,” said Ludvig Werner, head of IFPI.
Sweden is positioning itself as a global laboratory for the AI economy, amid concerns that AI could cut revenues to the country’s music creators by up to a quarter within the next two years.
Music rights society Svenska Tonsättares Internationella Musikbyrå (STIM) launched a licensing system last September, allowing tech firms to legally train their AI models on copyrighted works in return for royalty payments.
At the launch, Lina Heyman from STIM described the framework as “the world’s first collective AI licence”. She said it would “show that it is possible to embrace disruption without undermining human creativity.”
Sweden’s chart ban on Jag vet, du är inte min is tougher than the approach taken by international organisations like Billboard, regarded as the world authority on music rankings.
AI-generated tracks have featured in some of its specialist charts. Billboard says that its charts reflect the tastes of listeners. Tracks qualify if they meet its criteria for sales, streams and airplay, even if they have been generated by algorithms.
Bandcamp, a platform known for supporting independent artists, has taken a stricter position, however.
It has prohibited music that is “generated wholly or in substantial part by AI.” That includes tracks composed or produced by AI or using voice clones.
AI-generated music is forecast to explode in the coming years into an industry worth billions of pounds. As the needle drops on a new era of digital music creation, the controversy in Sweden over Jacub suggests that, for now at least, it is human musicians, not machines, who still call the tune.
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