The practice is called spoofing and it's being used by major record labels to battle Internet piracy.

Thousands of fake songs from popular artists such as Bryan Adams, India Arie, Blink-182, and Mary J. Blige have begun to pop up on the Internet's hugely popular file-sharing services.

When these seemingly innocent looking songs are downloaded and listened to, all that's heard is the sound of silence. In some cases, the song plays fine for about 20 seconds before the chorus loops endlessly. The files are bogus, placed on the Internet to foil would-be music pirates.

The recording industry has contracted a stealth-mode company called Overpeer to flood the Internet's file-swaping networks -- also referred to as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

The idea is to make music trading -- an illegal but incredibly popular practice with more than 60 million users worldwide -- so annoying that users will stop.

"It's gotten real, real, real severe," Darrell Smith, chief technical officer of StreamCast Networks, which runs the hugely popular trading service Morpheus, told the a U.S. technology newspaper.