The biggest AI music development of the summer is clear: The record industry feels it’s time to regulate AI songs.
In July, a coalition of music creators and the recorded music industry — including the RIAA, A2IM and SAG-AFTRA — came together to announce a proposal for how AI music could be treated across streaming services, aiming for a more uniform approach to regulation. Then, just weeks later, another record industry coalition, including many of the same players, suggested how charts should handle the inevitable rise of some AI-generated hits.
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These announcements mark a significant shift for the record biz. Over the last few years, as AI music went from a rare novelty to an expected, if not always welcome, part of the online experience, the recorded music industry largely stayed out of the growing public discourse about what specifically should be done to mitigate this new reality. Should AI songs be tagged, removed or algorithmically penalized in some way on the web? Should they earn the same royalties and compete for the same charts as entirely human-made content? And there’s always the sticky subject of AI-assisted music, a wide-ranging category that could include anything from a human-made song with a three-second AI-powered guitar lick to a 99% AI-generated tune.
Even though the recorded music biz didn’t unite to prescribe any specific remedies for AI-generated music on charts and online platforms until now, the biggest labels’ general position on the effect AI music has had was already clear with the majors’ lawsuits against Suno and Udio in June 2024. In those, the trio claimed that AI music “saturate[s] the market” and “directly compete[s] with, cheapen[s] and ultimately drown[s] out the genuine sound recordings.” In effect, the labels argued, something must be done…