Labor Day 2025 found me preparing for a push in Washington DC this month to reintroduce the Living Wage for Musicians Act (LWMA), which will require streaming platforms to pay recording musicians directly for the first time. Why are we not already paid directly for use of our work by streaming platforms, you might ask, when we are paid directly by other digital audio platforms like satellite radio, internet broadcast, and even proto-streamer Pandora? The answer is that fifteen years ago, the three major record labels cut an ownership deal with Spotify which let it enter the US market without making any such direct payments to artists. The LWMA would finally stop this abuse of musicians’ labor and intellectual property. (Please write your elected representatives and urge them to support it.)
Meanwhile, those same major labels have sued and are now negotiating with AI-music generating platforms Suno and Udio… in order to similarly take a piece of the AI action, rather than protecting artists’ work? No one outside of those negotiations yet knows for sure – but it would follow precedent if that’s where this is heading.
A recent report about one UK artist’s experience with AI provides a glimpse of what the world might look like for musicians fighting to correct it on a future Labor Day.
The BBC shared the story of singer-songwriter Emily Portman, who was surprised to find a new album credited to her on all streaming platforms – not only an album she hadn’t released, but one she hadn’t made. Yet it did sound, a bit, like her. Even the tracklist sounded like what she might write or choose to sing, such as the traditional song “Black is the Color.”
“It was uncannily, on first glance, like something that I might release,” Portman told Radio 4’s PM program. “For example the instrumentation included the harp, and the last three solo albums I’ve released I’ve worked with a brilliant harpist called Rachel Newton… And the titles were quite similar… I could have thought of titles like that, but I didn’t, because it actually wasn’t me.”
Even the fake album’s title, Orca, has an off-kilter, near-anagram relation to the title of her last real solo release, Coracle. But what I imagine was creepiest for Emily Portman is that the voice on this mysterious album sounded something like her own, with "a folk style probably closest to mine that AI could produce," as she said to the BBC, although “I'll never be able to sing that perfectly in tune.”
What is it like to hear your own music – your own voice – reflected back through AI? Future musicians won’t have to wonder, I don’t doubt. Emily Portman’s uncanny experience might become as ubiquitous as Auto-Tune is now, just another selection from a dropdown menu in a digital audio workstation.
What Portman experienced as a working recording artist needn’t come to pass for the rest of us, however. There is no reason that streaming platforms with the resources of Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music cannot distinguish legitimate releases from fraudulent ones. And in this instance – the impersonation not only of the sound of an artist but appropriation of their name and public platform - AI is clearly equivalent to fraud.
Yet there is little to incentivize streaming platforms to behave correctly in the situation, especially for an independent artist like Emily Portman. Were an AI-generated album to surface in a pop star’s likeness, you can be sure Spotify or Apple or Amazon would check before posting such a thing; and were they to make the error, they would act as quickly as possible to correct it. For Emily Portman? The BBC reports that, “Spotify took three weeks, and she still hasn't regained control of her Spotify artist profile.”
This slow response is a good explanation for why AI fraudsters would target someone like Emily Portman, rather than going for broke with The Weeknd. If you’ve ever experienced credit card fraud, you might be familiar with the criminal strategy of small false charges that don’t call attention to themselves, repeating and slowly ramping up over time. See what you can get away with, even if it’s not a lot, then do it over and over again.
Which might mean the musicians who are most likely to suffer from AI-generated fraud are the same who suffer most from streaming in general: working artists with moderate or niche audiences. Streaming platforms pay attention only to scale. Just as you might scan your credit card statement for large figures, but not notice a dollar and change here and there, platforms like Spotify could care less what is going on for artists like Emily Portman, or me, or most anyone I know making recorded music. They don’t serve the interests of working musicians like us.
“It felt very distressing that this music was out there under my name… I do think there needs to be better safeguarding, and ultimately legislation to help protect creative artists of all kinds,” Emily Portman said to Radio 4. That better safeguarding – and ultimately legislation – may, like the Living Wage for Musicians Act, need to come from initiatives taken by artists themselves. No one else seems to have our concerns in mind at this critical moment of technological change.
Listening to: August, by Scree
Cooking: Chayote, gifted by Mr. Mui at our community garden