Say you’re an up-and-coming singer-songwriter and you’re looking for an audience. You’ve got an active presence on social media, a deal with a major label and a proven sound that, while a little dated, probably would have sold reasonably well if it had come out around the peak of the late-’90s/early-’00s bubblegum pop era.

Oh, except you don’t really exist. Your supposed label has never heard of you (because you don’t exist) and your songs are pretty much all Jessica Simpson songs. No, not covers of Jessica Simpson songs — actual recordings that were released on Columbia Records in 2001 and newly posted to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and Tidal with new titles. Because you don’t exist.

That’s the story of Lucia Cole, as far as I can tell. I say “as far as I can tell” because, well, Lucia Cole seems not to exist and is, at this moment, quickly vanishing from the Internet. But on May 28, an artist by that name released an album called Innocence on iTunes, supposedly through Republic Records, which is owned by Universal Music Group, one of the three remaining major record labels.

Earlier this week, the blog Pop Culture Died In 2009 pointed out that these songs by “Lucia Cole” were, yes, actually just Jessica Simpson songs, re-uploaded to iTunes with different titles. That was one of many fabrications (these were uncovered and collected over the last few days by fan sites, Twitter users like @LeonButura, pop music message boards like ATRL.net and the Pop Culture Died In 2009 Tumblr). The story got picked up on other gossip blogs, many of which took a congratulatory tone. Call it a scam, call it a highly orchestrated art project, call it a hall of fame-level catfish — it was a dedicated act of role-playing.

When a colleague tipped me off to the story yesterday, the first thing I did was listen to Cole’s songs side by side with the Jessica Simpson songs, which are easy to identify, despite the fact that they’re all album cuts rather than singles, because the song titles are identical or remarkably similar: Simpson’s “What’s It Gonna Be” from the 2001 album Irresistible became Cole’s “Gonna Be”; Simpson’s “For Your Love” became Cole’s “Your Love”; “Forever In Your Eyes” and “His Eye Is On The Sparrow” became “Forever In Your Eyes” and “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.”

I called Republic Records, the supposed home of Lucia Cole, at 4:00 p.m. To zero surprise, a spokesperson confirmed that nobody by that name is signed to the label. By 8:30 p.m., all of Cole’s music had been removed from iTunes. It was, at the time this was written, still available on Amazon, Spotify and Tidal.

(UPDATE at 7:15 a.m. EDT, July 18: Amazon has removed Cole’s music from its store.)

Cole’s Wikipedia page was deleted earlier this week. Her Twitter feed is protected and she has not responded to requests for comment. An email sent to the contact address on her Twitter page was returned as undeliverable.

For the last six weeks, whoever uploaded those songs has been committing a theft of intellectual property so brazen it made me wonder how the album could possibly have made it into the iTunes store without some kind of red flag going up. SoundCloud employs software that can scan uploaded music and flag songs that sound too similar to copyrighted material already in the database.

I emailed Apple to ask about iTunes’ process for verifying content and label affiliations, but have received no official comment yet.

We shouldn’t be surprised by hoaxes, unverified assertions and lies on the Internet, but this fiction gets weirder and more elaborate the deeper into it you dig. Below are a few highlights from the short career of Lucia Cole, a.k.a. whoever was pretending to be Lucia Cole by stealing songs from old Jessica Simpson albums and photos from a model’s Instagram account.

• Lucia Cole’s ironically named Twitter feed, @trulylucia, has more than 64,000 followers.
• There’s at least one interview with Cole posted online, which either means that bloggers and journalists fell for the hoax without doing any fact checking or websites just don’t care whether the words they publish are true.
• Shaquille O’Neal endorsed her album on Twitter, saying, “Can you say new Mariah Carey? It’s fire”

Let’s end on an appropriately ambivalent note. According to a Soundscan report, no song by Lucia Cole has sold more than five copies. But the apparent ease with which this stunt was pulled off, and the length of time it took to come down lead to an inevitable question: How many more Lucia Coles are out there?

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But many people say they are leaving iTunes simply because it isn’t that easy to use. When the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs introduced iTunes almost exactly 14 years ago, on Jan. 9, 2001, he made fun of the other software-based music players like Real Jukebox and Windows Media Player. “They are too complex,” Jobs declared. “They’re really difficult to learn and use.” Jobs unveiled the first version of iTunes software from a stage in San Francisco, boasting that it was “really clean, really simple” and “far more powerful.”

It charmed a generation of music fans like Alex Newsom, who gets nostalgic talking about the first iTunes purchase she made when she was only 13 years old. “I downloaded this song by Liz Phair where it’s like ‘Why Can’t I Breath Without You,’ ” Newsom says. “I thought I was supercool because it was my first kind of grown-up-sounding song that I’d gone after myself.”

Newsom, who lives outside Seattle, is now 21 and increasingly frustrated with iTunes. For example, a recent update moved the playlist feature around. “You can still kind of go do things the old way but you have to go out of your way to do it,” she says. “And it’s clearly not the way that they expect you to do it.”

Newsom is not alone in her frustration. Jason Mosley, a Web designer who specializes in user experiences, says the last version of iTunes he used — 11 — made him work harder to do what he wanted. For example, instead of being able to create a stream of songs based on a single song he likes with one click, he now has to hover over the song and bring up a temporary menu and then select from different options.

Mosley says he was “shocked to see that they had this all nested within another link.” The Web designer says, “As a rule of thumb, for user experience you want less clicks to get to an action.”

Mosley says part of Apple’s problem is that the basic design is old. “It was built for older things,” he says. “I think it’s just kind of been added onto since then, and that’s just going to make it heavy and slow. Spotify, these new applications, they have the advantage. They are starting fresh.”

Indeed, iTunes has been through a lot of changes over the years. It’s more than a music service — it’s where customers buy and consume movies, TV shows and podcasts. Apple added a streaming radio service similar to Pandora.

Spotify is simpler. It’s all about music. Mosley has switched over, saying he’s willing to pay the $10 monthly subscription fee for the premium, ad-free version of the service because it’s so much easier to use.

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, thinks Apple should get credit for breaking open a new model for music with the mix of its software and the iPod — the first easy-to-use MP3 player. “The reason iTunes was adopted so well in the beginning was really not because it was great software,” he says. “It was because it was connected to this hardware that was unlocking your music access and letting you take it with you on the go and that was such a novel sensation.”

But McQuivey thinks Apple got a little over-confident. “They dominated digital music for so long, and maybe they thought, ‘Well, this is good enough. Look, it’s working for people. It’s going to replace the CD. We might as well just sit on it.’ ”

Meanwhile, services like Spotify, Pandora and Soundcloud were perfecting a new model — one dependent less on hardware and more on increasingly ubiquitous and fast wireless and cellular networks and a simple, single function: Connect to the Internet and stream millions of songs.

The story may not be over for Apple’s music service. iTunes still has some 800 million registered users. This past year Apple purchased Beats, which, along with its popular headphones, has a streaming service, which many think will be added to iTunes this year. But it’s clear that even if Apple adds streaming, users will still have to deal with a fairly complex set of options.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.