The case that started it all: how a poet from Chattanooga discovered his music had been stolen and rebranded under a fake name. Jump to the case data.
W. Joseph Johnson, known to audiences as Heavy Comforter, released an album called "3" on August 27, 2021 through Let's Pretend Records, a small independent label based in Bloomington, Indiana. The twelve tracks were recorded in his home studio: guitar, vocals, tape warmth, and the kind of songs that come from living a real life in a real place.
Billy is a poet from Chattanooga, Tennessee. He pulls his audience out of their deep hole of antipathy using music, drawings and paintings, and dark-room developed windows into the soul of the south. Heavy Comforter was his vehicle for that work. The album "3" was released on Bandcamp, sold a modest number of copies, and found its small, devoted audience.
Someone took ten of Billy's 12 recordings from "3," slowed them down using audio software (approximately 45 RPM to 33 RPM), renamed them, and uploaded them to Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube under the fake name "Zebulon Sheridan." A second fake identity, "Darnell Barrie," was used for at least one additional track. The uploads were made through Repost Network, SoundCloud's distribution service.
In early 2024, a Reddit user on r/eggpunk discovered the "Zebulon Sheridan" artist profile on Spotify through the platform's Smart Shuffle feature. Something felt wrong. The tracks, credited to a "mystery artist" with no online presence and cheap Canva cover art, sounded familiar.
The community did what communities do: they listened, compared, and connected the dots. The tracks on "White," the fake album, were unmistakably Billy's songs from "3," just slowed down. The tempo was different but the performance, the composition, the soul. All of it was Billy's.
Billy himself confirmed it in the Reddit thread. The tracks were his. He hadn't authorized any of it.
The person behind "Zebulon Sheridan" and "Darnell Barrie" has not been identified. What is known: they used Repost Network (SoundCloud's $30/year distribution service) to upload the stolen tracks to streaming platforms. The distributor did not verify copyright ownership. A checkbox was sufficient. A fake composer name, "Laura Bennett," was inserted into the metadata. A real artist by that name exists and has no connection to the fraud.
Once the community identified the theft, they directed listeners to Billy's actual Bandcamp page. Sales increased. The YouTube video for one of the stolen tracks was taken down during the investigation. The streaming presence appears to have been largely scrubbed. But the fraud itself, the fact that it happened at all, is the point.
This is not an isolated incident. It is a documented industry-wide pattern. An investigation by Saving Country Music identified 24 fake artist accounts with 112+ victims, generating an estimated $75,000 per year per fraud ring. A Pitchfork investigation found the same pattern: fraudsters uploading stolen or pre-release music to streaming platforms under fake names and collecting royalties as if it were their own. In 2026, a North Carolina man received the first-ever federal conviction for streaming fraud: an $8.1 million scheme using AI-generated music and bot accounts.
Billy's case is smaller in scale. But the mechanism is the same. And it's happening to creators every day.
Billy is one creator. Ten of his twelve songs were re-recorded and sold as someone else's work. But for every Billy who discovered the theft, there are creators who still don't know their work is being used, whether as slowed-down tracks on Spotify or as training data for AI models. The mechanism is the same: someone takes what you made, uses it for their own benefit, and never asks. Beaumont & Sheridan exists to help those creators.
Appendix. Verified records compiled by Beaumont & Sheridan. Original investigation 2026-05-07; archived Spotify data on file.
Heavy Comforter, "3", Let's Pretend Records, published 2021-08-27, Bloomington, Indiana. Recorded in The Highland Park Darkroom by WM. Johnson (vocals, guitar, bass, percussion, synth, drum machines). Mastered by John Hoffman. ~19:55 total.
| # | Original title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heavy Comforter Intro | 0:51 |
| 2 | Motherwell Feels | 1:32 |
| 3 | Can't Go Home at Night | 1:22 |
| 4 | Crazy Gross and Old | 2:14 |
| 5 | Uninhabited Planet | 1:55 |
| 6 | NVR Been to Holland | 2:07 |
| 7 | The World Without Wonder | 1:30 |
| 8 | I Won't Go | 1:07 |
| 9 | Caucasian Shits | 1:51 |
| 10 | All Thru the Night | 2:07 |
| 11 | A Couple More Nightmares | 2:54 |
| 12 | Heavy Comforter Outro | 0:25 |
Source: Bandcamp release page.
Ten tracks published 2023-08-04 and distributed through Repost Network (SoundCloud's distribution service, $30/year). Released to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, TikTok, and Instagram. Each track is a slowed copy (approximately 45 RPM to 33 RPM) of a Heavy Comforter "3" recording with a new title. Track titles, durations, and archived Spotify track IDs below. All ten tracks are the same performances, compositions, and recordings as the originals — only tempo and title differ.
| # | Infringing title | Length (archived) | Original on "3" | Match status | Spotify track ID |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A World | 1:50 | The World Without Wonder | candidate | spotify:track:0Qrbm5wy0IqGxaMt4fy1Uv |
| 2 | At Night | 1:42 | Can't Go Home at Night | confirmed | spotify:track:2P39OiB3C0TVU6tbhzeczI |
| 3 | Fat And Aging | 2:25 | Crazy Gross and Old | candidate | spotify:track:7hQBMvXb8iZ64t1g8S0iaX |
| 4 | Going | 1:27 | I Won't Go | candidate | spotify:track:0Iwu9Nfyrw4RNrauRvHEKh |
| 5 | Holland | 2:20 | NVR Been to Holland | confirmed | spotify:track:3nLxLWE969UnlTW190MLse |
| 6 | More Nights | 3:14 | A Couple More Nightmares | confirmed | spotify:track:0fnIncyprXcircSY21xPlX |
| 7 | Motherwell Feel | 1:49 | Motherwell Feels | confirmed | spotify:track:2SM4FhxYHHYowQD7FwWmXl |
| 8 | Overnight | 2:25 | All Thru the Night | confirmed | spotify:track:6hZ8zwlq9HkaxtXU4rW5V6 |
| 9 | Planet | 2:11 | Uninhabited Planet | confirmed | spotify:track:4FlnTE6TW2eVIkhu3elQ8b |
| 10 | White | 2:10 | Heavy Comforter Outro (candidate) | candidate | spotify:track:2qFDXDt7aSUchYI5FcaSwD |
Archived album: spotify:album:0A7H9hBmZDjjniUQLQtbjm. Cover art was low-quality, blank-white Canva-style template. Three tracks from "3" (Heavy Comforter Intro, Caucasian Shits, and one additional) are not among the ten re-titled copies, suggesting the uploader selected or re-pooled ten of the twelve recordings. The slowed copies are re-uploads of Billy's recordings, not new works; the tempo change creates no new authorship.
A second fake identity, "Darnell Barrie," was used for at least one additional stolen track: "Cold," derived from Heavy Comforter's "I Was Colder."
| Identity | Stolen from | Stolen as | Spotify artist ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| Darnell Barrie | I Was Colder | Cold | spotify:artist:4Cbo6sah40ewSu17cvmpj8 |
The composer credit on "White" lists "Laura Bennett" a real, unrelated artist who had nothing to do with these recordings. Her name was placed in the metadata without her knowledge or consent. This is identity theft layered on copyright infringement. Her unrelated Apple Music artist page is ID 1583186326.
| Record | Identifier |
|---|---|
| "White" album (Spotify) | spotify:album:0A7H9hBmZDjjniUQLQtbjm |
| "Zebulon Sheridan" artist (Spotify) | spotify:artist:1J8DXO1Pv8CFETraepu0ZE |
| "Darnell Barrie" artist (Spotify) | spotify:artist:4Cbo6sah40ewSu17cvmpj8 |
| "Zebulon Sheridan" artist (Apple) | Apple artist ID 1695522620 |
| YouTube "Release - Topic" channel | UCmfcNM-JuKwsLlcFH6Fy4WQ |
| Distributor | Repost Network (Repost by SoundCloud) |
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| "3" first published | 2021-08-27, Let's Pretend Records, Bloomington, IN |
| "3" public location | letspretendrecords1.bandcamp.com/album/heavy-comforter-3 |
| Author and copyright owner | W. Joseph Johnson, performing as Heavy Comforter. Sole author of the sound recordings and compositions; distribution with the label only, no ownership transfer. |
| "White" released | 2023-08-04 |
| YouTube auto-video | 2023-08-06, "Release - Topic" auto-generated channel |
| Distribution lane | Repost Network subscription service, delivered to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, TikTok, Instagram |
W. Joseph Johnson is the sole lawful author and copyright owner of every recording on "3." Return of the stolen copies to his legitimate control, and reinstatement of the releases under his name, is the objective. The person who made the uploads owns no rights to the recordings and holds no license to release them.