Last week streaming platform Tidal announced an AI music policy to go into effect July 15. Its tenets are simple:
Tidal will identify and tag AI-generated music in our app. Listeners will see an “AI” badge next to music we detect as wholly AI-generated.
Tidal will not tolerate AI-generated music that impersonates an artist or group, or that facilitates fraudulent activity. We’re implementing automatic tools to remove these releases immediately and on an ongoing basis.
Tidal will not allow music that is 100% AI-generated to be monetized. No royalties will go to such releases, nor will AI-generated uploads be eligible for direct-to-fan sales.
These are baseline rules that all platforms should follow. But among the larger players there has been much more activity directed at licensing and profiting from AI-generated music than there has been around building guidelines for its use like Tidal is enacting.
However, even with such sensible practices there remains a fundamental gap between the interests of distributors like streaming platforms, and individual musicians creating content that is shared via those platforms. A distributor’s business is built on volume – and AI music provides nothing if not volume (it’s already generating 7 million songs a day, according to leading AI-music company Suno). Tidal might refuse to pay royalties on AI-generated music; but that doesn’t preclude profiting from it as a platform. Any increase in volume represents a rise in traffic and a potential boost to market share, with all the benefits a company might derive from that.
What’s missing from Tidal’s list of guidelines is the primary protection creators need in the AI economy: direct, meaningful income from the digital distribution of our human-generated work. Sure, you can demonetize AI-generated music. But streaming platforms have already devalued all music. Pre-AI, Spotify quite literally demonetized 88% of existing tracks on its platform, including many of my own.
AI-generated music is flooding the marketplace via streaming platforms. That is a problem for consumers, and Tidal has proposed a simple solution for that through labeling. It is also a problem for platforms in so far as they are being gamed by AI-generated slop, and again Tidal is addressing that by demonetizing those tracks.
But creators are facing a problem established well before this latest technological shift: our work is not compensated sufficiently by platforms. Nothing in Tidal’s AI music policy addresses that, yet this is what must change to protect labor in the AI era. Without a viable solution for artists, all that will be left is AI-generated music, guidelines or no guidelines.
Listening to: Magazine by YHWH Nailgun
Cooking: yogurt with salt and mint
I gather Deezer introduced a similar policy. It won’t make streaming pay though. 20k streams earned me about $60. And a considerable loss after Distrokid upload fees. I suspect Distrokid could stop the AI uploads. And the artist impersonation. But then they earn from it.
YES