> Tidal will hold AI-generated music to a higher standard of content integrity. We will not tolerate AI-generated music that exploits an individual’s or group’s music, name or likeness, deceives listeners, or diminishes the quality of our service.
I think this is a very reasonable approach, and probably also the best way to treat AI-powered copyright infringement as a whole. Just like we don't penalize artists for consuming content unless they produce actually infringing content, we should set the same focus for AI systems.
> Starting today, AI-generated music will not be monetizable. We are only in the beginning of the era of AI-generated music.
Don't really agree that this follows from the stated principle here ("... ensuring royalties go to original works produced, written and performed by people"), but will definitely help with spam etc.
And the flood really is overwhelming. This weekend my mom was complaining about having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle Unlimited. I mentioned that the relative lack of slop is one of the major reasons I chose Kobo over Kindle. Even before this latest AI boom I was already starting to view less content as a feature, not a bug, because it seems that on subscription services “more” is increasingly just a polite way of saying “more crap.”
Similar feelings about Nebula vs YouTube, although Nebula straight up doesn’t have entire genres, or videos in languages other than English, so it doesn’t really work as a general recommendation.
I really wanted to like Kobo but the no refunds policy really burned me. I bought a book listed as being in English, with an English title and English on the cover page, but the contents were entirely in French and they wouldn't refund it because of the general no refund policy. I just felt ripped off because what I bought, as advertised, just wasn't what I received.
I don't follow this rule strictly, but for most of my adult life I've limited most of my book reading to books > 10 years old. If it still seems remotely relevant and worth reading ten years later, it is far less likely to be a waste of my time. Now sure I'm a bit less prepared for water cooler conversations, but overall the policy has served me well.
> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle
because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.
A significant amount of ebook reading now is romance/erotica or fantasy (or combined "romantasy") genres by readers for whom something a decade old won't appeal. An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time), or it isn't what one's peers are reading and one wants to connect with a community of other readers online or in school/university, etc.
Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.
> An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time),
Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.
I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).
In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.
I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.
I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.
I've encountered AI copies of songs from popular artists, hopefully this will stop or at least slow that down. I suspect the only reason those songs are uploaded is because people will accidentally listen to it and then the up loader gets the streaming revenue.
But that's not a new issue per se, low effort "covers" / "remixes" of songs has been an issue for a long time. Bonus point if said low-effort remix includes the original artist in the artist fields, so it shows up in the recommendations of fans of the original artist for a lot of accidental listens.
When low effort goes to no effort one can expect the problem to worsen by several orders of magnitude.
Also not that it takes skill to come up with a remix/cover/homage of a song that is close enough to the original that people can enjoy it like the original, but not so close that you are just plagiarizing it. So this problem before AI is limited to talented musicians who for some reason would rather copy somebody else then to make their own music.
It’s really bad on smaller artists that had moderate vitality on TikTok. Or at least it’s easier to spot since they have smaller catalogs. Encountered some on Apple Music the other day that outright had the artist listed and according to Apple it was from the artist.
IMO they need to focus on the scam side more than the AI side.
I think the flood is also due to people in general finding AI generated music passable.
I may be in the minority but I like AI generated music. Do you ever really like a song in the current moment and want one almost exactly like that? Mostly for background music. I like to listen to synthwave while working and since I may listen for 10-20h a week, I hear the same songs over and over. Maybe I should be more selective or curate my playlist, but it's just work. I would love a stream of AI generated music in a particular style I can work to.
You see that a lot in AI (and honestly, other discussions) where people with differing requirements are talking past each other.
Some people are listening to music as an experience, internalizing lyrics, empathizing with the feeling and vibes of the artist. Others are just wanting something pop-y as background noise while they do work. They come together and since they're arguing for different needs, the whole thing turns into a mess.
> how will Tidal consistently determine AI generated music?
Is this their responsibility? Just restrict payment to the registered copyright holder or their delegate, require registration of copyright for music to be payment-eligible, and escalate the problem to a federal crime with (presumedly) federal enforcement, no? Sure, some people will commit federal crimes to get a payout, but it's gotta reduce the problem massively.
People do listen to it and enjoy it but to some degree it becomes a marketing problem. I don't know how to weight the moral issue of someone missing out on a song they would love and instead getting a one they merely like because the ai stuff is flooding the market, but it would be nice to tip the scales a bit in the other way.
Tidal should simply ban AI generated music from upload if they are not willing to pay uploaders should the music become popular. Under these rules an AI generated country and western song that makes it to number 1 on the billboard chart makes Tidal money and the uploader nothing.
> We will therefore not knowingly attribute royalties to music we identify as wholly AI-generated.
Seems like Tidal is leaning on a probable lack of copyright for fully generated works here, otherwise wouldn't this run head-first into the music modernization act?
i feel like it's going to be hard to defend whether, for example, handwriting and rewriting the lyrics and style prompts is enough to make it classified as non AI generated in the end.
it's not like they'd make the subscription free if you listen to loyalties-free music only.
I'm curious about they will apply the part saying "AI-generated music will not be monetizable." What does AI-generated music mean, exactly? What if you make an AI generated bassline but produce the rest of a track by hand? How about an AI vocal? Or a mix of AI stems and your own recordings?
> “AI-Generated Content” means any audio content, inclusive of musical works and sound recordings, that is wholly or substantially generated by generative artificial intelligence, with limited or no direct human creative input beyond an initial text prompt or similar instruction. ... You acknowledge that AI detection technology may produce false positives or false negatives.
And:
> If you use TIDAL Upload, your Tracks may be scanned for the purpose of identifying whether the content is AI-Generated Content, and to label such content accordingly on the Tidal platform. You acknowledge that such scanning and labeling is performed on a best-efforts basis and that Tidal shall not be liable for any inaccuracies in AI detection or labeling. AI-Generated Content uploaded to Tidal is not eligible for monetization. If you believe your Tracks were erroneously tagged as AI-Generated, you can reach out to support@tidal.com.
As a musician I can definitely tell when a song has been arranged by AI but performed by humans. There are a couple of chart-toppers done this way. I won't give up the ghost, though ;)
I’m also curious! Are you keeping a secret because you don’t want people to try to find work arounds, kind of like prompting LLMs not to say “delve” or “tapestry” in order to make your AI writing sound less like AI? Or is it something else?
Really don't mean any offence to your comment because you probably mean well but I have little tolerance for the "reasonable"/fence-sitting kind of comments on this kind of issues.
If they really cared to much about empowering people creating things for other people, like others have pointed out, they should just ban it.
Sure, in reality it's not so easy to just ban AI content because there is a spectrum of it and it's really not a clear-cut problem.
But your stance can be clear-cut, and in this messy world where there is no perfect solution one way or the other, your stance matters even more. You could either be seen as a fence sitter who allowed slop to happen, or someone who stands with human creativity battling against shitty people and their slop.
Please stop this kind of fence-sitting reasoning if you care about people.
Not sure about the stated principal, but I do think it follows the policy nicely. Yes, you can upload your AI generated music, but it will be tagged as such, and you cannot profit from it.
The issue i have with it will depend heavily on implementation, i can see cases where songs that i would consider "produced and written" by people don't qualify for royalties under Tidal's guidelines. (I intentionally left out the "performed" part, since digital music production is way past the point where this was an easy and/or meaningful distinction)
Depend on jurisdiction and probably how AI much is generated. If you write the lyrics but generate the song you still have copyright to the lyrics and so on
In Canada (which I assume you were referring to, as you didn't specify a jurisdiction) this claim is currently in litigation, so there is no definitive answer as to whether AI generated music is copyrightable or not.
The currently accepted definition of "originality" (as required by the Copyright Act) is that it must involve the claimed author's "skill and judgment". Whatever that may mean in the context of AI is currently left for the reader to decide.
Minor correction, but in the US it's not anything that's 100% by AI, it's LLM output itself is not copyrightable. Human elements injected into LLM output are.
Raw LLM output lacks human authorship, and it was ruled cannot be registered for copyright protection. Raw LLM output is automatically public domain (which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).
Only the parts of a work that are human authored can be registered for copyright. If a work was created with AI assistance, the parts that were purely AI generated cannot be registered.
The US copyright office also ruled that prompt engineering does not count as human authorship.
So all those people using Suno to generate AI slop music and flooding the streaming services, their output is almost certainly public domain.
>(which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).
I don't see how it's any more weird than reddit/stackoverflow/linkedin trying to clamp down on AI scrapers, even though they don't own the copyright to the UGC that they're preventing the bots from accessing.
The difference is in licensing. Those platforms are protecting (or rather, monetizing) a database of human authored assets which those humans have given them a license to exploit.
Anthropic (and others) are trying to protect a stream of uncopyrightable, public-domain machine outputs.
I don't see how that's relevant. They have a license to redistribute my comments, but that's the extent of their legal rights with respect to my work. They're not my agent or my publisher. Moreover I don't have any say in the matter. If I'm pro AI scraping, I can't tell them "yeah it's fine to scrape my comment, don't put up any captcha walls". Finally, what if I dedicate my comments to the public domain? Does that mean they're in the wrong to put up scraping walls?
The license goes beyond redistribution. You are granting a sublicensable and transferable right to your content, giving the platform the legal authority to sell or license it (or to not license it) to AI scrapers and other entities. The platform's right to block said scrapers comes from posession rights.
Its like if you made a painting and put it in a museum. You still technically own the copyright, but the museum owns the building. They can lock the door, charge admissino, kick out anyone they want, prevent anyone they want from seeing it, etc. You licensing it to them makes it their private property to do with what they wish.
> I can't tell them "yeah it's fine to scrape my comment, don't put up any captcha walls".
Correct, because you signed away that control.
> what if I dedicate my comments to the public domain?
That means you forfeit copyright, but you cannot waive the platform's rights regarding their servers.
But, because you still retain copyright (or in the case that its public domain), you can and are welcome to submit it to AI companies yourself. Just because Reddit may not allow a scraper, that doesn't remove my right as the copyright holder to re-submit my comment to another platform that does allow the scraper.
The difference with Anthropic/LLM output is that there are zero intellectual property rights over the outputs once they leave the API endpoint.
>The license goes beyond redistribution. You are granting a sublicensable and transferable right to your content, giving the platform the legal authority to sell or license it (or to not license it) to AI scrapers and other entities. The platform's right to block said scrapers comes from posession rights.
They don't need to sublicense it because the license was already granted by you. Stackoverflow comments are licensed under creative commons, which means you don't need to seek a license from stackoverflow to use it. It's same if you found some random MIT licensed repo on github. It's not github granting you a sublicense, it's coming from the original author.
>You still technically own the copyright, but the museum owns the building. They can lock the door, charge admissino, kick out anyone they want, prevent anyone they want from seeing it, etc.
And Anthropic can't decide who gets to use their service, and for what purpose?
What if I prompt Claude to go prompt Suno? What if the same chain happens internally at Suno? Easy to imagine the human input being very dilute and a small part overall.
The US copyright office ruled that the instructions do not count. Prompt engineering does not constitute human authorship. Prompt is the command, but the machine determines the specific expressive elements of the output (according to the USCO).
Tool was a kind of metal/funk band (or something like that) and Oracle is a database (management system) that somehow made a lot of money for a lot of consultants (and the oligarch owners) even though open source alternatives were far superior.
The difference between AI and artists is that artists are humans, which should grant them more rights and fewer penalties than some fucking software.
Artists don't get penalized, but for that reason, we should penalize the hell out of it.
If a bunch of hyper intelligent space aliens came in and started squeezing the rest of us out of creative economic activity, they shouldn't be on an equal playing field either. Laws and rules exist to serve humans, not machines.
> Laws and rules exist to serve humans, not machines.
Machines don't go out on their own to create and upload music, they do so under human instruction, so their output should be policed the same way we police other machine generated output directed by humans.
I really hope someone makes a music platform in the future that is verified as human-made. Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it.
Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically – maybe the company can be a record producer in disguise and physically meet every musician they host.
Just broke 1000 albums this past weekend. It's delightful to be able to just listen to something then hand the artist money and download the flac files.
I also really like the quasi social aspect where users have simple profiles. No messages between users, no likes, no ratings, no BS. About the most you can do is leave a text review. Your profile is an image and text field so you can write a simple bio and provide links to whatever. My entire Bandcamp collection is discovered by crawling profiles and randomly listening to things. I also found some fun personal sites and so on. The site design is also simple and not a JS laden mess like "MoDeRn" ampwall.
Do you have any recommendations for casual listening of downloaded music files? I'm pretty done with Spotify and would rather spend money on Bandcamp. The main hurdle is that I'm not enough of a music person to want to spend much time organizing a collection, I just want an easy way to put some music on while I'm working.
If you keep each album in its own folder, basically any app will be able to use the MP3 tags to keep things organized for you. Really even the folders aren't needed, you could just have a huge directory full of every MP3, but that would be annoying to deal with for other reasons.
Something like https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ can be used if you want to get more complicated. For instance I like to keep albums in folders per release year.
> Artificial intelligence and machine learning are not new to music creation, they have just become more commonplace and advanced
In other words, there is no bright line. AI techniques have been a part of music creation from the start. What makes bad AI music hard to detect and remove is the fact that it is a much closer approximation of regular music.
Let me preface this by agreeing that we should have platforms for only human-generated music.
> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it.
Like most things, this is an overgeneralization. In general, I agree, but not always.
While most AI-generated content is not going to appeal to most people, it's wrong to say that all AI-generated music is not about what music is about. Personally I find _some_ AI generated music to be amazingly fun to listen to, but mostly it's parodies or works that are essentially built on top of existing media.
A creative person using AI well can produce art that people enjoy and which adds to our culture (I selectively choose not to say "create" here to avoid that very overloaded connotation w.r.t. AI creations). That is not to say that most of the work that comes out of AI needs to exist or does any of those things.
> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it
"art is in the eye of the beholder."
I listen to a lot of EDM, which can be very mechanical, but I personally have strong emotional connection to. I personally would welcome AI-generated music as an alternative to human-made.
To be clear: I do agree a "human-verified" system would be great, but I don't think it would be black and white. And I would guess that eventually AI music will be better than a lot of human made music.
I made (what would eventually get called) EDM in high school and a lot of what I enjoyed was dismissed as “not real music”. It’s not a musician playing it, but a computer! Unless a guitarist was plucking strings or a pianist hitting the keys, it wasn’t “real”.
Doesn’t matter how carefully crafted it was: it’s only real if you couldn’t hit “play”. Sorry, Mike Oldfield. Hate to break it to you that you’re a fake musician.
I agree with you. I do enjoy some live musicians jamming on a stage, but for a lot of the genres I frequently listen to, I’d have no way of knowing if a song was written by human or by AI. If it’s good, it’s good.
I learned music production by first learning how to produce house. Because of this, I can confidently say that house is not music. You literally just copy/paste over and over. Just because a human makes something, doesn't make it good or "music" necessarily.
People engage with music in different ways. Some people focus on lyrics and the connection they make. Other people largely ignore lyrics and focus on the rhythms and patterns. Both are valid and both are very human. We do not need gatekeepers coming in and judging what is music and what is not music.
House music can bring me as much joy as listening to Bach performed by a skilled ensemble. It depends on where I am at mentally. Both are valid forms of human expression.
It's pretty clear you didn't get beyond the very basics of music production or house music if you think this. I'd love to hear your masterfully produced house track to prove me wrong, though.
Their approach of "manually tagging songs that are good 'non-AI' and not good 'AI'" is a questionable approach from an engineering and product perspective.
They would benefit much more from a have a better recommendation and ranking algorithm that carefully monitors all metrics, recommends high-performers, and excludes unpopular content from the feed.
You can use the fact it was AI-generated as a signal, but it is just a signal among other criterias, not an outright ban.
Essentially, explore songs and artists, exploit winners.
Lot of people abort a song/artist/creator/etc.
Lot of fake listens.
People don't like the song of an album
Creator is historically with a low score
etc...
Then you judge the popularity of a song, an album, a creator, a playlist, etc not its creation method. Exactly like a genre type. It's not because you don't like country music that everybody should be forbidden to listen to country music.
It's good for them too, the more streams they do, the more money they get, and the more their audience is engaged. If the person doesn’t like “AI-generated genre” then just downrank it heavily on its recommandation feed, like YouTube or TikTok does.
I believe we've already crossed the quality threshold for being equal to or "better" (subjective) than human.
For EDM, check out the AI artist "Vibfy". Especially the song "I Hear You" as it has the best mastering so far. The melody and vocals of all the songs are fire, but in some of the earlier songs the mastering is sub-par with strange volume changes and muddy beats.
There is an AI folk band called "We're all f*cked" that is incredibly good and indistinguishable from actual humans.
You will probably be able to listen to machine-generated music on most major platforms. I just hope there’s one which excludes all of that.
Personally I think it’s a bit like cultural junk food: it has the appearance of real food, but leaves one hungry afterward. Which really isn’t all that surprising – music isn’t just some random collection of patterns, it’s intimately tied to real culture. Current AI software is only ever going to copy and regurgitate human culture, not make meaningful creations from scratch.
I agree with the other poster. I think it's very difficult to guide this missile so that it blows up AI-generated music and doesn't blow up EDM.
My own taste in music is pretty junk-food-y I guess. Electronic music and not the pretentious kind. Dubstep, electro. Give me something that goes wub-wub. Incidentally, I think this experience mostly isn't one about human connection? Like, there is some circuit in my brain that likes that sound and wants to be tickled.
I can play classical piano to a mediocre standard. I listen to it and enjoy it occasionally. But, honestly, what I feel like my spirit needs is something that goes wub-wub and I think that space is densely seeded enough that maybe we can scale back human involvement in producing it.
Sure that’s fair, and maybe my ideal platform doesn’t really work for electronic music and works better for singer-songwriters that perform live. Which is fine - I just like the idea of a platform that guarantees that a real person made this music.
I don’t mean electronic music writ large, I mean AI generated music.
Electronic music is probably my favorite genre, broadly. But there’s a human behind the machine, not a random collection of patterns. To use a concrete example: NIN is about 1000% more interesting because of who Trent Reznor is, and not because it’s merely good music.
This disconnect is much more of an issue with say, country or bluegrass or jazz. To divorce those from the musician and their cultural context is to miss the whole point.
Typing “make me an electronic guitar song about a bad breakup” is a whole lot different than learning to play the instrument yourself and conveying your own emotions from your real experience into a song that you write and perform.
If you can’t see how these are fundamentally different things, I don’t know what to tell you.
I think a lot of songs about bad break-ups were written by talented musicians without actual experience of a bad break-up, riffing on the corpus of songs they'd heard about bad break-ups.
Like, a lot of times you're just engaging with someone's desire to have made a song, and what they felt about some songs that someone else made.
Even if you generate the soundtrack, if you set the lyrics it can be great music. At least for one person, who chose the lyrics. I set some poems on music and I absolutely love the results.
Do you really think that's the only way to do it? I spend hours refining the output, slicing things up, redoing certain parts, tossing it into the DAW and compressing, adding effects, etc. I mean, if you think one shot prompts are the only way to use AI to make music fine, but you're being intentionally obtuse.
YouTube is already recommending tons of AI-generated electronic music. It's pretty easy to spot: It will have millions of views and the "artist's" discography will only go back to 2025 or 2026. It's usually just singles. The cover art is vague atmospheric AI-generated. The "artist" will have no presence online save for a couple instagram account with a couple posts that are also AI-generated.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all, I'm saying electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song.
AI can't do "robotic" math music, it's best at sappy generic emotive stuff. (I guess this isn't at all a surprise for those that know how the musical sausage is made.)
As I stated elsewhere in the thread, the streaming platforms do not have the correct incentives to do this. It’s the labels that do releases that are correctly incentivized, as they need to build an audience that trusts them and enjoys the music that they release.
Independently-released music is a huge red flag. If you can’t find a single label A&R to support you, you may have to work on the quality of your output… music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are tens of thousands of labels across nearly every imaginable genre. Their role as gatekeeper is a valuable one.
The vast majority of music I listen to on SoundCloud is released on small labels (<10, <100, or <1000 artists). It is not that hard to release on those labels. There are tens of thousands artists releasing on thousands of labels every Friday.
That being said, I guess I may have some genre bias. Maybe it’s exceedingly difficult to get signed to a small label as e.g. a Midwest Emo Band (bad example because I have friends who released on a small label as a Midwest Emo Band). But you need to put in the effort if you expect me to give you my precious listening time.
A platform like that exists. It's called Subvert. It's a cooperative that was created as a response whenever Bandcamp has changed ownership several times. The idea of Subvert is to focus on the artists instead of the interests of the founders and investors.
Perhaps. But just how human made? We already had the “Depeche Mode isn’t real music because they just push play on a sequencer” debate 40 years ago.
And lots of composers can’t play the stuff they write. But the composition is human.
Then there’s emerging AI-supported music, since AI can come up with and test harmonic ideas far more sophisticated than most people. If a human’s saying “no, not that, try using an augmented sixth to get us from F#maj to Cmin”, is that human generated?
Not trying to be contrary, just saying the definition needs to be really clear, and that’s going to be difficult.
To me it’s less about the technologies used to produce the audio. If a human has put some creative effort into it, even if it’s mostly curating AI-generated audio, I’m in principle fine with that. But if little to no effort was put into it, it’s slop by definition.
That would be interesting and could start simply. CDBaby was what, $20 per record and self-serve. Maybe each record on this new platform costs $200 and is accompanied by an employee-uploaded video of the artist uploading the record.
Your statement is so imprecise as to be meaningless. Is EDM made on an Abelton DAW human made? Even though the human didn't touch an instrument and used a robot drummer? What about a human who uses AI to generate snippets of music and then pastes them together in an emotionally compelling way, much like HipHop artists do for traditionally sampled music? AI is a tool. Low/no-effort work on the part of humans is the problem.
As of now, you can tell the difference for most AI generated music. There's some where you cannot. There is no Turing Test for taste, and the specific constellation of features that represent your particular interpretation of what things like human, best, goodness, excellence, beauty, and any other label you might apply to abstract qualities will be reproduced at a sufficiently high resolution that you will no longer be able to meaningfully discern between human and AI creations. In a blind test, you will prefer the AI product, and your own perceptions and biases will convince you that the AI generation is actually human, because whatever ineffable abstractions you attribute to "human" quality will be replicated, refined, and exploited.
The very act of recognizing some difference is the tool with which the next generation of outputs is refined, until it's so "good" for any and all particular instances of "good" that human perception is insufficient to differentiate the source.
At some point we're going to have to admit that the distinction based on source is a problem, and perhaps there's a lot of nuance in the context of any particular piece of media such that an arbitrary dismissal of a song, or image, or piece of writing, for the mere reason that AI was used to produce it in whole or in part is missing the point.
If you enjoy a song, your enjoyment is real. If you appreciate beauty, your perception of beauty is real. If you feel deeply about a written text, your feelings are real.
How you perceive things, while not entirely conscious, does involve elements of choice. Make the choice to judge things on meaningful merit, and if the next generation of musicians and artists use AI tools to explore new territory, don't dismiss their art and passion and creations out of hand.
An electric guitar is artificial. People used to make the same sorts of "that's not music" statements people are making now about music and art. Imagine being so twisted up over some arbitrary distinction that you miss out on Jimi Hendrix or BB King, or Joe Satriani, or any of the brilliant musicians that have wrung beauty and soul from "artificial" electronic signals.
There was an interesting study recently which showed that if you put a human-written short story up against an AI-written short story, the AI wins. But if you put an anthology of AI-written short stories up against an anthology of human-written stories, the human-written anthology wins.
I see the same thing in music. I accidentally clicked on a couple of AI albums in YouTube. On a minute-by-minute basis they aren't necessarily bad. But if you keep listening, even though the stream is nominally an hour long, it's the same couple of minutes over and over again, more or less.
In the case of music I could see a coder preferring that for their background noise, but for direct listening for its own sake, once the initial impression wears off there isn't anything left.
I'm not necessarily saying this from an anti-AI position, either. This is just the current reality of the situation. At the moment, AI art has a very flattening effect.
What's more, I spent some time at Suno and tried to get it off the beaten track. I was able to get it to create broken music with chopped up words and instruments that were confused about what they were by trying to make an excessively-interesting combination of genres. It broke before I could get anything really interesting going on musically. Possibly if someone spent a lot of time with the higher-touch music tracking tools they could get something interesting happening but I had enough of the same problems there that I bailed. Even if you try to inject your own inspiration, the AI has a very strong flattening effect.
Text I think you could probably do better with. I have not tried to write fiction but I've done a lot of non-fiction writing with it at work. But no matter how I prompt it, it is always flabby. I can style-shift it away from Default LLM Voice, and it's at least somewhat more concise than that, but I can't get it to be truly concise.
I think most of what you’ve written here only really applies if you listen to music without knowing anything about the musician.
That seems pretty uncommon to me, for most people. The most popular musicians in the world are basically celebrity characters, with the music as a key ingredient, not the only one. Do Taylor Swift fans or Kanye fans or [musician] fans just listen to the music and not follow the person? Pretty unlikely IMO.
I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.
> That seems pretty uncommon to me, for most people. The most popular musicians in the world are basically celebrity characters, with the music as a key ingredient, not the only one. Do Taylor Swift fans or Kanye fans or [musician] fans just listen to the music and not follow the person? Pretty unlikely IMO.
Yes, and AI music generation (like auto-tune before it) enables people to choose their celebrities from a wider pool than "the type of dork who practices guitar for 10000 hours".
Frankly, this is also how I mostly listen to music - I set a song or two I like, then I let auto-discovery keep adding to the list.
If I happen to like it, I hit thumbs up/like. Otherwise I ignore it.
I sometimes go through and browse musicians, mainly to see if they have other songs I might like, but generally speaking... it's not high on my list of priorities. Then again, I don't give a shit about the "pop" aspect of music at all. It's mainly background noise I put on while doing something else.
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As an aside:
> I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.
I think this is where it gets weird, and I think you're pretty solidly incorrect here. Samplers and grooveboxes absolutely play music by themselves. I think there's also a weird world where things like "Girl Talk" are somewhat spiritual successors to AI music...
Ex - I definitely love girl talk, and I'm not in any way implying that those albums don't take skill and taste, but he's literally just playing samples of other artists. If that's real music (and I'd argue strongly that it IS real music) then I think I struggle to rule out AI generated songs that are edited by someone (and if you've used this tooling, it still requires lots of editing).
> Samplers and grooveboxes absolutely play music by themselves.
I disagree. You cannot take your Akai MPC out of the box and ask it to play music. You have to load samples, you have to arrange them and you have to instruct it to play. That seems like a far cry to me from "playing themselves." You still have to... write the music.
You're correct that AI will probably end up producing the majority of music no one cares about. Like the muzak you hear on elevators. Or for people that just put on a playlist at work and don't really care much beyond having some background noise.
When you're paying attention, and if you actually care about art and music as human expression, then it will matter. And maybe AI music will still "fool" someone then. Maybe we'll discover the next Michael Jackson was just prompting their way to the top of the charts. But that won't really be the point, just like it wasn't the point when everyone discovered that Milli Vanilli were faking it.
People don't like liars. And using AI to generate art is lying. You didn't make it, the AI that did make it was only possible because it collectively stole from every human musician and artist before it. You can wrap it up however you like, but at the end of the day its just a lie.
And yeah there's some nuance here. Lets take Milli Vanilli for example. They were considered frauds because they weren't actually singing on their tracks. What if they had been singing, but using autotune? I don't know where you draw the line but for me its somewhere around people who have no appreciation of the amount of effort that goes into producing art that think they can create it whole cloth from a couple of prompts.
AI music has taken over small businesses like coffee shops and restaurants. AI music drives me nuts because, to me, it still is very much deep in an uncanny valley. That said, I can't blame the businesses because they are all (dis)incentive driven.
The music industry has stepped up its efforts globally to crack down on small businesses that play copyrighted music. They actually hire people to go into these places and spot violations.
People blame social media for the death of the monoculture but I think music rights holders have done a fair share of the damage to themselves.
This is all about streaming platforms commandeering royalties away from artists.
The way royalties get assigned is based on a percentage of your listening versus your monthly payment.
For example, spend an entire month listening to Taylor Swift’s new album, she gets the entire royalty share.
But if you listen to the album 100 times but then listen to lofi beats 900 times, Taylor only gets 10%.
The “earnings per stream” number you’ll see cited is only an average and varies greatly because there’s only so much money to go around since your listening is unlimited.
But now you have services like Spotify that are removing real songs from “mood” playlists and replacing them with AI music that directs royalties toward Spotify.
Another factor that has happened: record labels have been working to screw over artists so much that they actually negotiated lower royalty rates with Spotify in exchange for company stock.
Giving up royalties but then instead owning a part of Spotify effectively directs money away artists and toward the labels.
For me personally, I no longer hear the difference between AI generated music and new pop-songs. Not sure what that says about me or the music industry.
I think food is a good analogy here. This is a bit like saying I can’t tell the difference between the McDonald’s that is 90% automated and the McDonald’s that’s 20% automated. You’re still just talking about McDonald’s, which is manufactured and engineered to deliver a very specific taste and flavor.
Pop music, almost by definition, is not innovative. Consider the experimental bleeding edge that pushes the evolution of genres. Eventually, that experimental sound enters the pop cycle. Off the top of my head, Fred Again was innovative in 2022, Kettama was innovative in 2025. Fred’s already pop-adjacent, if not full on directly impacting the pop industry at this point. If you want slightly older examples, I would give you Skrillex circa 2010, or Zedd circa 2014.
Why don’t they play indie alternative pop music? It’s easier than ever to create, surely there are many bands with almost no audience who would give away their music for free. The reason may be discovery, but they could band together and make a centralized platform.
Because then the coffee shop has to curate it or the band needs to market to the coffee shop.
Incentives are mismatched here - the indie band benefits from being noticed and sought out, the coffee shop wants to set a vibe without distracting or irritating anyone (which music can do simply by repeating, if you don't curate a large enough collection).
So unless your playlist is, like, part of the product you're selling (which it is for a number of coffee shops to be fair), you just look for something like "10 hours of lo-fi beats to study to" and throw it on.
I just want Tidal and Spotify to give me the option to fully opt-out of AI generated music. I don't want it mixed in with my music. If others want it great, but I want the option to not engage with the content.
I feel the same way, but it’s hard to draw the line:
- was the song totally one-shot “make me a song in the style of X?”
- was it a legit artist that used AI to create a verse lyric stanza after they’d already created the entirety of the melody/ chords etc?
I would go with, if the song could be reasonably performed live by the human publishing it, and have a similar sound to the recording, then its fine to keep in. The issue I have is songs like this one, where there is no way anyone could even try to perform it
That doesn't really work for electronic music though.
Electronic or not, whether messing with a buchla or producing via vsts and changing knobs around still ends up with a human feel and human choices in a way AI music doesn't.
And what about the line between triggers or samples? I can play some impossible AI music if I sample the impossible parts and just say it's a sample played on a synth or whatever.
It’s not even limited to “electronic” music. Consider that sound engineers work with hundreds of layers on a single track to engineer a very specific sound. Then a pop star adds vocals. Then those vocals are engineered beyond recognition. Sometimes if the vocalist is talented enough they go on tour and then perform with minimal after-effects, and sometimes they lipsync.
It would be a shades of gray situation, but I think of this performance by Skrillex where he is mixing live, and thats what I would expect from a live EDM performance. There should be a line between a EDM artist, and a DJ
Nothing personal, but there's something hilarious about "I demand a quick and easy solution to a likely practically impossible problem once you get into details" -- in opposition to AI.
This isn't a problem which needs to be solved perfectly, at least in this context. If some electronic music creators (using 2015 level technology) get reduced play and some fully AI music gets through the filters it's really fine.
I'm a Tidal subscriber, something like this is needed.
My Tidal "feed" is full of new releases that are clearly AI-generated. They use the same artist name as artists that I really like, but the music is clearly not from the artist as advertised.
I have no problem with AI-generated music, I just don't want someone trying to spoof the artists I am interested in.
This is a discovery problem, and all the streaming platforms are trash at discovery because discovery is a long tail problem. That’s where record labels shine because of individualized A&R and tastemakers, which is why record label consolidation is antithetical to quality music output (edit: and diverse).
However, you’ll also notice that none of these streaming platforms highlight which record label is responsible for which release, though you can find it under additional info sometimes. Tin foil hat is that the large record companies don’t want such a feature to be present on streaming platforms. But more likely is that product employees at streaming platforms don’t think users care about record labels, which they’re right, 80% of users don’t currently care about which record label releases which track or recording.
Give me a streaming platform with “Label” as a first class entity that I can like, follow, etc. My theory is that it will produce a much healthier long tail, because trustworthy labels are already a robust source of non-AI music.
Do you have some impersonated artist names I would be able to look up? This isn't a thing I have (knowingly) run into on Spotify yet and I'm really curious to see more
Yes (as in the band Yes) on Tidal at one point had a bunch of probably-AI-generated albums that Tidal shoved into Yes' discography because the “artist” included “Yes” in the name (with album titles like “Yes, it's raining” and other such nonsense). Thankfully it seems Tidal's cleaned those out.
"Yes" and "BT". I've also some across some AI-generated slop under the name "Rush". There's someone releasing a new track almost every day as "BT" that is clearly not "BT".
I didn't see the naming issue that the other reply had with "Yes", but I do frequently see their name pop up with slop.
> Tidal defines AI-generated music as music that is wholly or substantially generated by generative artificial intelligence.
I think this needs more clarity. I can think of a lot of different ways AI is used in music today as a part of the song generation process and not sure whether or not this definition would apply to it. They specifically mention developments in "text-prompted generation" but if anything that confuses the issue more, for example what about training on specific music.
This isn't a comment on how expansive or narrow the definition should be, just that they need to spell it out more to allow for consistent application (to say nothing of enforcement). If someone uses ChatGPT for lyrics, but writes the instrumentals themselves, does this policy apply? I genuinely have no idea.
+1 - and what about an entirely AI generated song with a human who adds a 0.1 sec hum. Or even this hum is copypasted from another human generated song.
What connection to morality is there from taking action and earning less money? I can think of many morally positive situations that would match this odd vague phrasing you're presenting.
I wish Youtube Music would offer some relief from the flood of AI music on their platform. My frustrations with YTM are exacerbated by the fact that it has the absolute minimum in functionality when it comes to browsing or searching.
I don't understand the user hostile nature of so many services these days when it comes to content discovery. We all know the data is there, but making it available for the user to actually browse or god forbid a modicum of search filters is like some forbidden fruit.
The detection problem is genuinely hard. Even desktop AI agents I've been working with recently can control Spotify, fill forms, navigate apps — all indistinguishable from human interaction at the OS level. If that's hard to detect at the application layer, detecting AI-generated music at the audio layer seems like a cat and mouse game that Tidal will struggle to win without self-reporting from uploaders.
Then the slop merchants will simply move to controlling a DAW with AI and use the same software synths that everyone else does. It's a little more involved and slower, but far from hard.
Ultimately this isn't really solvable without a way of marking audio with a verifiable signature that it was produced by a specific human, with some kind of reputation algorithm.
This is a totally fascist musical bias -- I have been using spectral techniques in music since the late 1980s. It has been common for decades. "Unnatural" spectral packet distortion is a component of a wide-breadth of existing music that pre-dates modern generative AI. I am confident that the false positives will be overwhelming and unfair to many artists. Such a cowardly and lossy solution.
Maybe if enough AI produces self-report their work as AI, and enough non-AI producers are honest about uploading non-AI work, they'll quickly have the necessary amount of good-enough data to train good classifiers?
I mean you can outsource it to users, which also allows you to organically make exceptions for AI music that is actually popular.
You really just want your users, who hate AI, to see a big "REPORT AI" button they can click. The problem you are trying to solve is the perception among your users that your platform is dominated by AI slop. So at the end of the day the only thing you actually have to figure out is what your users think is AI slop, have a quick trigger on un-popular stuff, and basically never enforce on popular stuff unless there is actually some controversy.
I've been a Tidal subscriber for several years, and while I've not seen much of the AI music problem (yet), there's been a big issue with people getting their music intentionally or unintentionally labelled under other artists names. The platform has had some odd technical hiccups too over the past year, so I've started wondering how many people are left actually maintaining it all (there were layoffs pretty recently).
Same here, and I've run into annoying technical issues too. I am on the verge of canceling, but this new AI-skeptical stance makes me want to give them another chance. Sometimes I like to listen to their stations instead of my own playlists, but if you leave them on long enough they will eventually start playing obvious AI slop. If they actually figure out how to let me filter out ALL AI generated music, then I will be a happy customer even when their app throws meaningless error codes at me instead of playing music.
Makes sense for them as a business, but still a bummer to have AI music mixed in with human music at all. To me there is literally no point to AI music. Music is communication. The artist is communicating with the listener through a pretty unique and magical asynchronous medium. AI (as we know it today) can't meet that bar and so it does not meet my definition of music.
The whole “what is art” question has different answers for different people. Yes, for some, music is communication, but when I listen to metal in the gym it’s an adrenaline boost. When I listen to brain.fm, it’s for focus. When I listen to a rap song with an MC that’s great at storytelling, then it’s communication. Sometimes it’s just a utility though. I’ve played music for about 30 years - live, in bands, in my bedroom - played many instruments, written electronic music, made lots of noises. But I’m not always trying to communicate something. In fact I’m sometimes scared I don’t have anything good to say with my music. So I just play it.
I agree in sentiment, I love knowing that another human made this, either because I fancy I could maybe do something as good as that, or because I just admire the talent, or simply because the lyrics or music touch me somehow.
That said, there are a lot of people who simply enjoy having something playing in the background, it doesn't matter what, and if you're into country music it's great to have 10,000+ hours of country music to play.
If Tidal provides a checkbox so you can choose whether to exclude AI content, I think that would work for both audiences.
I wonder if we are gonna see an emerging market where musicians are hired to provide support for AI music farms, I feel like gig musicians can easily cover/learn to play anything without much trouble
This would then become something similar to how legal tech where a license is required to practice law relies on a few lawyers sitting as a gate after the AI
I do have a music recommendation from a live person. After check was not a real person, it was quite a popular ai artist doing funk music.
Here we are. music is great, people do not suspect it's ai, artist behind AI is making money. Real work, real people are happy. It's just the voice and instruments are not real. How is it different from club music made in fruity loops? This music is just more complicated, hence no fruity loop. With AI you don't need to assemble the entire band do to funk music. Isn't that democratize access to music production?
I'm a musician by hobby, but used to make a living of it in my younger days. AI music has come to stay, can't do anything about it - the cat is out of the bag.
I know professional musicians that will use AI models like Suno as an aid to their tracks - mostly where they'd previously use samples or program things themselves. In these cases, where the track may be x% AI and (1-x)% Human performance, where x is very small, I think monetization or even copyright shouldn't be too difficult.
But I also know people that use tools like Suno for everything, where every single aspect of the song: Lyrics, music, production is all done by AI tools. They basically just prompt some style and vibe they want, and will upload the result. In these cases, I don't think monetization or copyright should be possible.
Then again, it is difficult to know how much AI someone used to generate their tracks, so I'm not sure how this could be enforced. I also know people that are earning very good money off their (entirely) Suno-generated tracks.
I have a great solution. They can point chatGPT to their AI generated slop and get AI generated enjoyment from others appreciating their "Art". Meanwhile, keep that out of my sphere.
Honestly I don't know that I care about AI generated tracks, like you said it's the same argument one could make for samples or drum machines or synths or a dozen other previous technologies in the music space. What I actually miss is music curation and discovery, instead of a just a giant slop-pile of new music that I can't possible sort through, or an algorithm defines for me.
I'd love some Internet Pirate Radio. If someone wants to sort through the best all-AI tracks and run those, that'd be cool. I don't want an AI to pick the best AI tracks.
> AI music generation tools are changing how music is created and distributed. As this technology evolves, Tidal is introducing platform standards to protect artists, their craft, and inform listeners.
> Here are the highlights of our new AI Policy:
> - 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.
> - We will expand these policies to music that is substantially AI-generated when AI detection technology is sufficiently reliable to do so.
> You'll start seeing these changes from July 15.
> Check out the full policy here. To learn more, please visit our FAQ.
> For the music,
> The Tidal Team
All in all seems reasonable. There's definitely been a wave of cheap slop flooding Tidal's library lately and removing the incentives for it seems like the exact correct approach to stemming that tide.
The only thing worrying to me is the use of “AI detection technology”; that stuff is notorious for both false positives and false negatives, and it seems to only be getting worse as AI is getting better at hiding its “tells”. As long as there's an appeals process with a human in the loop it should work out fine.
I'm also curious about how they'll define “substantially AI-generated”, i.e. where they'll draw that line. Human vocals over an AI backing track? AI vocals over a human backing track? All human performers, but using instruments with AI-generated sounds?
Some of this is sensible. The copyright authority (can't recall right this moment what it is called in the US) has said only works by human beings are copyrightable. A good argument is that therefore there is no reason to pay royalties on AI generated work as it is the equivalent to public domain.
Take away the attraction to the grifters and you reduce the issue.
Of course this does not eliminate the problem of the streaming platforms tolertating AI generated work so that they do not need to pay as much out for your subscription fee.
Personally, if there were a decent Spotify alternative that had a zero tolerance to gen AI policy, I'd switch without a second thought.
> A good argument is that therefore there is no reason to pay royalties on AI generated work as it is the equivalent to public domain.
That has some different second order consequences that I don't think you're seeing. It's not that they will be free to you as a user, it's more that they will be free from the platform perspective to do whatever they want with the revenue they get from it.
Say for example you have a platform with Spotify monetization scheme for instance, which is already very unfair to small artists. But now imagine you have to compete to be included on auto play or playlists against something that's basically free for Spotify, what's your chance of getting any money out of it? Say Spotify changes their algorithm and starts pushing 20% of all auto play playlists to consist of AI songs, that's basically a 20% bump on their profit basis.
Given that Tidal will likely, and ironically, utilize AI to determine what music is considered AI, the decision to block monetization of AI categorized music is likely also unfair to artists who use spectral DSP and/or sample from AI generated sources though largely compose music in a manner similar to other common computer mediated music studio workflows. Such music may very well land in the realm of false positives. This is another step by streaming platforms which funnels and restricts musical creativity.
Cool stuff. I love AI music. Listen to it all day while writing code or whatever. Most of the time it’s the outrun or vaporwave like 1 hr playlists on YouTube and then I have a few Suno songs I’m fond of when I feel a specific mood strike me.
It’s pretty cool technology. You just ask for a certain feeling to be evoked and you can have it done. Magical.
Same, although I prefer Endel. It’s a paid subscription, but their objective-focused playlists work really well for me. Relax, Focus, Deep Focus… very effective.
It seems consistent to me. I'm not sure if suno represents the state of the art, but the output I've heard from there seems to be noticeably lower fidelity than a skilled amateur recording. In many cases, it's still more than good enough. But Tidal advertises things like "lossless", which is a much higher fidelity threshold than anything suno can produce, at least that I've heard. Crediting artists might be taken to mean crediting human artists whose creative output is represented by the music. Sending royalties to "AI musicians" displaces some of those potential payments.
I suppose. To me, Tidal was always on the side of artists rather than big faceless studios. Now there's an even bigger, even more faceless entity - and it's surprising to me that Tidal is giving them a platform rather than blocking it entirely
The policy seems a lot more reasonable than the straight up dystopian scam that Spotify runs, but I am surprised that there isn’t any streaming service that’s marketing heavy on “no AI allowed” considering the percentage of people who are against AI. Seems like small players like Tidal could make some headway with marketing like that.
I have serious doubts that their detection will be good enough, especially in cases where it's not 100% AI generated. The EDM and hip hop genres relies heavily on samples, and I guarantee all the sample services all being pumped full of AI generated creations. Many artists using the sample won't even know they using things that are AI generated.
That's the joke of RFC 3514. Setting the evil bit of a packet to 0 means it is harmless and no defensive action should be taken. Secure systems should defend against packets with the evil bit set to 1. Insecure systems may choose to crash, be penetrated, etc.
I don't agree with the overall point, but what they are saying is that if Tidal makes a "lofi hip hop mix beats" playlist, then they have to pay a nickel to an artist if they direct the user to their song, but NOTHING if they direct to someone who uploaded an AI song. So that's an extra nickel of profit for pointing to the AI song.
In reality, I don't think this is how it'll shake out. But it's a valid argument.
True, though it seems like at least 75% of the traffic on various social media and streaming sites is content that people want to avoid, yet there it is.
I like what I see from their policy. They accept that it’s part of the industry landscape and also say it’s not monetizeable. They will likely revisit and revise their stance as things change.
I strongly agree on labeling the generated content.
That's fair, allow AI slop but tag obvious AI slop as such. Hopefully they add an option to hide detected AI slop, something I wish Youtube had for instance.
An interesting problem in the background of this is the cope.
Which is to say, there are a lot of people who think "they can tell AI" in music, wherein you can cue the famous picture of the airplane with the bulletholes.
I'm not sure what you can do about it, and part of me hates it too -- but youtube has absolutely given me 100% AI generated music that's full of soul and better than, say, Bruno Mar,s IMHO.
(For those interested, my two examples would be the gospel "Thong Song" and the fake rock-n-roll dis track against 50 cent "by TI's Son," 2 quarters...)
There is only zero incentive if the filter detects AI music reliably. It's still a race between effective detection and cost to generate content, isn't it?
Suno et al don't really have a incentive to hide the fact that their tracks are generated using AI. Quite the contrary, the only way they won't get sued to death by UMG and the other big labels is to disclose AI generated tracks.
Unless they directly embed promotions in it. I could see this being an avenue for brand-derived fake artists. I wonder if they already have a policy for that and I wonder why it wouldn’t apply to, say, the beastie boys talking about adidas.
They say only wholly produced music using AI can't be monetized, nothing stopping it's 95% AI and 5% Human. Also no concerete definitions of what that even means.
I think that they mentioned both wholly produced music or substantially produced music. I think that it will be a fuzzy line but for example in the case of 95% AI and 5% human probably won't work.
If there's a market, then a competitor app with different policies will likely arise.
The other aspect that's missing from the discussion here is LEGAL. If Tidal is making money from stolen music -- although arguably they still are by offering it on a subscription basis -- then that opens them up to litigation. From that perspective, this may double both as risk-mitigation and also a marketing opportunity for them, would love an attorney to weigh in there.
(From the comments here, Spotify is the market leader and already pays out for AI generated music. But I can't say that independently.)
I appreciate a platform for art to at least attempt at maintaining the semblance of it being for humans. If AI 'artists' disagree, they can boycott Tidal and not post their songs there. For me that is a feature that I actually really value, because AI slop making Spotify money has materially worsened my experience in that platform.
> Starting today, AI-generated music will not be monetizable.
AKA: We will take the value, if any, AI-generated music gives, but we will not be paying royalties. This is a contradictory statement. How does the AI-generated music give value if the generated content is inherently worthless?
I think my comment is being misunderstood. I don't think AI music has any value. I'm just calling out that Tidal's right and left hands are saying two different things. The left hand: AI music has no monetary value. The right hand: AI music is valuable enough to host on the platform. This is the schism that doesn't make sense to me.
> Tidal will accept AI-generated music.
> Tidal will hold AI-generated music to a higher standard of content integrity. We will not tolerate AI-generated music that exploits an individual’s or group’s music, name or likeness, deceives listeners, or diminishes the quality of our service.
I think this is a very reasonable approach, and probably also the best way to treat AI-powered copyright infringement as a whole. Just like we don't penalize artists for consuming content unless they produce actually infringing content, we should set the same focus for AI systems.
> Starting today, AI-generated music will not be monetizable. We are only in the beginning of the era of AI-generated music.
Don't really agree that this follows from the stated principle here ("... ensuring royalties go to original works produced, written and performed by people"), but will definitely help with spam etc.
The flood of AI music on their platform is becuase people can make money off it. If you turn off that faucet you stop the flooding.
And the flood really is overwhelming. This weekend my mom was complaining about having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle Unlimited. I mentioned that the relative lack of slop is one of the major reasons I chose Kobo over Kindle. Even before this latest AI boom I was already starting to view less content as a feature, not a bug, because it seems that on subscription services “more” is increasingly just a polite way of saying “more crap.”
Similar feelings about Nebula vs YouTube, although Nebula straight up doesn’t have entire genres, or videos in languages other than English, so it doesn’t really work as a general recommendation.
I really wanted to like Kobo but the no refunds policy really burned me. I bought a book listed as being in English, with an English title and English on the cover page, but the contents were entirely in French and they wouldn't refund it because of the general no refund policy. I just felt ripped off because what I bought, as advertised, just wasn't what I received.
I don't follow this rule strictly, but for most of my adult life I've limited most of my book reading to books > 10 years old. If it still seems remotely relevant and worth reading ten years later, it is far less likely to be a waste of my time. Now sure I'm a bit less prepared for water cooler conversations, but overall the policy has served me well.
> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle
because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.
A significant amount of ebook reading now is romance/erotica or fantasy (or combined "romantasy") genres by readers for whom something a decade old won't appeal. An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time), or it isn't what one's peers are reading and one wants to connect with a community of other readers online or in school/university, etc.
Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.
> An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time),
Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.
I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).
In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.
I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.
I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.
I've encountered AI copies of songs from popular artists, hopefully this will stop or at least slow that down. I suspect the only reason those songs are uploaded is because people will accidentally listen to it and then the up loader gets the streaming revenue.
But that's not a new issue per se, low effort "covers" / "remixes" of songs has been an issue for a long time. Bonus point if said low-effort remix includes the original artist in the artist fields, so it shows up in the recommendations of fans of the original artist for a lot of accidental listens.
But AI does seem to make it easier.
When low effort goes to no effort one can expect the problem to worsen by several orders of magnitude.
Also not that it takes skill to come up with a remix/cover/homage of a song that is close enough to the original that people can enjoy it like the original, but not so close that you are just plagiarizing it. So this problem before AI is limited to talented musicians who for some reason would rather copy somebody else then to make their own music.
It’s really bad on smaller artists that had moderate vitality on TikTok. Or at least it’s easier to spot since they have smaller catalogs. Encountered some on Apple Music the other day that outright had the artist listed and according to Apple it was from the artist.
IMO they need to focus on the scam side more than the AI side.
I think the flood is also due to people in general finding AI generated music passable.
I may be in the minority but I like AI generated music. Do you ever really like a song in the current moment and want one almost exactly like that? Mostly for background music. I like to listen to synthwave while working and since I may listen for 10-20h a week, I hear the same songs over and over. Maybe I should be more selective or curate my playlist, but it's just work. I would love a stream of AI generated music in a particular style I can work to.
You see that a lot in AI (and honestly, other discussions) where people with differing requirements are talking past each other.
Some people are listening to music as an experience, internalizing lyrics, empathizing with the feeling and vibes of the artist. Others are just wanting something pop-y as background noise while they do work. They come together and since they're arguing for different needs, the whole thing turns into a mess.
So why not just disallow it entirely, if that’s the goal?
Sure, but how will Tidal consistently determine AI generated music? This is new frontier of spam.
So begins the Clone Wars...
> how will Tidal consistently determine AI generated music?
Is this their responsibility? Just restrict payment to the registered copyright holder or their delegate, require registration of copyright for music to be payment-eligible, and escalate the problem to a federal crime with (presumedly) federal enforcement, no? Sure, some people will commit federal crimes to get a payout, but it's gotta reduce the problem massively.
The real reason is not that people can make money off it, it's that actual people are listening to it.
Let them do, if they like to listen, whom are you to say their tastes are bad ?
> 97% of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human made music
https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-ai-m...
People do listen to it and enjoy it but to some degree it becomes a marketing problem. I don't know how to weight the moral issue of someone missing out on a song they would love and instead getting a one they merely like because the ai stuff is flooding the market, but it would be nice to tip the scales a bit in the other way.
I think this is also a reason why X has gotten worse. They pay people for engagement.
Tidal should simply ban AI generated music from upload if they are not willing to pay uploaders should the music become popular. Under these rules an AI generated country and western song that makes it to number 1 on the billboard chart makes Tidal money and the uploader nothing.
> We will therefore not knowingly attribute royalties to music we identify as wholly AI-generated.
Seems like Tidal is leaning on a probable lack of copyright for fully generated works here, otherwise wouldn't this run head-first into the music modernization act?
i feel like it's going to be hard to defend whether, for example, handwriting and rewriting the lyrics and style prompts is enough to make it classified as non AI generated in the end.
it's not like they'd make the subscription free if you listen to loyalties-free music only.
Indeed. When they say that AI music can’t be monetized, they of course mean “… except by us”.
I'm curious about they will apply the part saying "AI-generated music will not be monetizable." What does AI-generated music mean, exactly? What if you make an AI generated bassline but produce the rest of a track by hand? How about an AI vocal? Or a mix of AI stems and your own recordings?
Tidal's terms and conditions (https://tidal.com/terms) say that:
> “AI-Generated Content” means any audio content, inclusive of musical works and sound recordings, that is wholly or substantially generated by generative artificial intelligence, with limited or no direct human creative input beyond an initial text prompt or similar instruction. ... You acknowledge that AI detection technology may produce false positives or false negatives.
And:
> If you use TIDAL Upload, your Tracks may be scanned for the purpose of identifying whether the content is AI-Generated Content, and to label such content accordingly on the Tidal platform. You acknowledge that such scanning and labeling is performed on a best-efforts basis and that Tidal shall not be liable for any inaccuracies in AI detection or labeling. AI-Generated Content uploaded to Tidal is not eligible for monetization. If you believe your Tracks were erroneously tagged as AI-Generated, you can reach out to support@tidal.com.
As a musician I can definitely tell when a song has been arranged by AI but performed by humans. There are a couple of chart-toppers done this way. I won't give up the ghost, though ;)
It would be far more interesting if you did. Not sure why you feel need to keep it secret.
I’m also curious! Are you keeping a secret because you don’t want people to try to find work arounds, kind of like prompting LLMs not to say “delve” or “tapestry” in order to make your AI writing sound less like AI? Or is it something else?
are there tells beyond the lyrics? I swear there are a number of songs using out of “human distribution” words, trigrams, etc.
Is it overall song structure?
Really don't mean any offence to your comment because you probably mean well but I have little tolerance for the "reasonable"/fence-sitting kind of comments on this kind of issues.
If they really cared to much about empowering people creating things for other people, like others have pointed out, they should just ban it.
Sure, in reality it's not so easy to just ban AI content because there is a spectrum of it and it's really not a clear-cut problem.
But your stance can be clear-cut, and in this messy world where there is no perfect solution one way or the other, your stance matters even more. You could either be seen as a fence sitter who allowed slop to happen, or someone who stands with human creativity battling against shitty people and their slop.
Please stop this kind of fence-sitting reasoning if you care about people.
Not sure about the stated principal, but I do think it follows the policy nicely. Yes, you can upload your AI generated music, but it will be tagged as such, and you cannot profit from it.
The issue i have with it will depend heavily on implementation, i can see cases where songs that i would consider "produced and written" by people don't qualify for royalties under Tidal's guidelines. (I intentionally left out the "performed" part, since digital music production is way past the point where this was an easy and/or meaningful distinction)
Isn’t it true that AI generated music holds no legal copyright?
Depend on jurisdiction and probably how AI much is generated. If you write the lyrics but generate the song you still have copyright to the lyrics and so on
In Canada (which I assume you were referring to, as you didn't specify a jurisdiction) this claim is currently in litigation, so there is no definitive answer as to whether AI generated music is copyrightable or not. The currently accepted definition of "originality" (as required by the Copyright Act) is that it must involve the claimed author's "skill and judgment". Whatever that may mean in the context of AI is currently left for the reader to decide.
Why is that? And who draws the line? If I use a synthesizer to generate music, does that count as AI generated?
I was under the impression that the US copyright office/various judges already determined that anything created 100% by AI is not copyrightable.
A synthesizer is not AI.
Minor correction, but in the US it's not anything that's 100% by AI, it's LLM output itself is not copyrightable. Human elements injected into LLM output are.
Raw LLM output lacks human authorship, and it was ruled cannot be registered for copyright protection. Raw LLM output is automatically public domain (which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).
Only the parts of a work that are human authored can be registered for copyright. If a work was created with AI assistance, the parts that were purely AI generated cannot be registered.
The US copyright office also ruled that prompt engineering does not count as human authorship.
So all those people using Suno to generate AI slop music and flooding the streaming services, their output is almost certainly public domain.
>(which is also why its silly for Anthropic to be in such a tizzy about China using Claude's output, Claude's output is public domain).
I don't see how it's any more weird than reddit/stackoverflow/linkedin trying to clamp down on AI scrapers, even though they don't own the copyright to the UGC that they're preventing the bots from accessing.
The difference is in licensing. Those platforms are protecting (or rather, monetizing) a database of human authored assets which those humans have given them a license to exploit.
Anthropic (and others) are trying to protect a stream of uncopyrightable, public-domain machine outputs.
I don't see how that's relevant. They have a license to redistribute my comments, but that's the extent of their legal rights with respect to my work. They're not my agent or my publisher. Moreover I don't have any say in the matter. If I'm pro AI scraping, I can't tell them "yeah it's fine to scrape my comment, don't put up any captcha walls". Finally, what if I dedicate my comments to the public domain? Does that mean they're in the wrong to put up scraping walls?
The license goes beyond redistribution. You are granting a sublicensable and transferable right to your content, giving the platform the legal authority to sell or license it (or to not license it) to AI scrapers and other entities. The platform's right to block said scrapers comes from posession rights.
Its like if you made a painting and put it in a museum. You still technically own the copyright, but the museum owns the building. They can lock the door, charge admissino, kick out anyone they want, prevent anyone they want from seeing it, etc. You licensing it to them makes it their private property to do with what they wish.
> I can't tell them "yeah it's fine to scrape my comment, don't put up any captcha walls".
Correct, because you signed away that control.
> what if I dedicate my comments to the public domain?
That means you forfeit copyright, but you cannot waive the platform's rights regarding their servers.
But, because you still retain copyright (or in the case that its public domain), you can and are welcome to submit it to AI companies yourself. Just because Reddit may not allow a scraper, that doesn't remove my right as the copyright holder to re-submit my comment to another platform that does allow the scraper.
The difference with Anthropic/LLM output is that there are zero intellectual property rights over the outputs once they leave the API endpoint.
>The license goes beyond redistribution. You are granting a sublicensable and transferable right to your content, giving the platform the legal authority to sell or license it (or to not license it) to AI scrapers and other entities. The platform's right to block said scrapers comes from posession rights.
They don't need to sublicense it because the license was already granted by you. Stackoverflow comments are licensed under creative commons, which means you don't need to seek a license from stackoverflow to use it. It's same if you found some random MIT licensed repo on github. It's not github granting you a sublicense, it's coming from the original author.
>You still technically own the copyright, but the museum owns the building. They can lock the door, charge admissino, kick out anyone they want, prevent anyone they want from seeing it, etc.
And Anthropic can't decide who gets to use their service, and for what purpose?
Nothing is “created 100% by AI” though, because AIs don’t create things without human instructions.
How much instruction do you need though?
What if I prompt Claude to go prompt Suno? What if the same chain happens internally at Suno? Easy to imagine the human input being very dilute and a small part overall.
The US copyright office ruled that the instructions do not count. Prompt engineering does not constitute human authorship. Prompt is the command, but the machine determines the specific expressive elements of the output (according to the USCO).
Raw LLM output is automatically public domain.
The prompt is yours to copyright, the algorithm belongs to Google or Suno or whoever, but not the output. It is not your creation.
AI is not a tool, it is an oracle.
Furthermore, it is an oracle built on copyright infringement.
Do you understand the difference between "tool" and "oracle"?
AI is not an "oracle" no matter how much Altman and Amodei claim it is.
No. Explain.
Tools are things that you 100 percent control based on nothing but your own skill.
Oracles are things that give you free stuff if you've been a good boy and respected the oracle's rituals.
So if I sample a guitar because I don't know how to play the guitar, is the tool I used to sample it "an oracle"?
Tool was a kind of metal/funk band (or something like that) and Oracle is a database (management system) that somehow made a lot of money for a lot of consultants (and the oligarch owners) even though open source alternatives were far superior.
The difference between AI and artists is that artists are humans, which should grant them more rights and fewer penalties than some fucking software.
Artists don't get penalized, but for that reason, we should penalize the hell out of it.
If a bunch of hyper intelligent space aliens came in and started squeezing the rest of us out of creative economic activity, they shouldn't be on an equal playing field either. Laws and rules exist to serve humans, not machines.
> Laws and rules exist to serve humans, not machines.
Machines don't go out on their own to create and upload music, they do so under human instruction, so their output should be policed the same way we police other machine generated output directed by humans.
I guess you haven’t seen some of the agentic stuff?
I work with coding agents every day, I don't think they have ever started working on a project without me telling them to
I really hope someone makes a music platform in the future that is verified as human-made. Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it.
Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically – maybe the company can be a record producer in disguise and physically meet every musician they host.
Bandcamp is well on their way already. If you want to support actual musicians, you can just buy their music directly. https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
Just broke 1000 albums this past weekend. It's delightful to be able to just listen to something then hand the artist money and download the flac files.
I also really like the quasi social aspect where users have simple profiles. No messages between users, no likes, no ratings, no BS. About the most you can do is leave a text review. Your profile is an image and text field so you can write a simple bio and provide links to whatever. My entire Bandcamp collection is discovered by crawling profiles and randomly listening to things. I also found some fun personal sites and so on. The site design is also simple and not a JS laden mess like "MoDeRn" ampwall.
Do you have any recommendations for casual listening of downloaded music files? I'm pretty done with Spotify and would rather spend money on Bandcamp. The main hurdle is that I'm not enough of a music person to want to spend much time organizing a collection, I just want an easy way to put some music on while I'm working.
If you keep each album in its own folder, basically any app will be able to use the MP3 tags to keep things organized for you. Really even the folders aren't needed, you could just have a huge directory full of every MP3, but that would be annoying to deal with for other reasons.
Something like https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ can be used if you want to get more complicated. For instance I like to keep albums in folders per release year.
> Do you have any recommendations for casual listening of downloaded music files?
Other than the simple approach of playlists and/or shuffle, unfortunately no.
> I just want an easy way to put some music on while I'm working.
Think of Bandcamp as a record store, not a radio station.
You open the music you download with something like IINA or Doppler, and you're off to the races. What exactly is the hurdle?
What is your response to Tidal’s statement
> Artificial intelligence and machine learning are not new to music creation, they have just become more commonplace and advanced
In other words, there is no bright line. AI techniques have been a part of music creation from the start. What makes bad AI music hard to detect and remove is the fact that it is a much closer approximation of regular music.
Let me preface this by agreeing that we should have platforms for only human-generated music.
> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it.
Like most things, this is an overgeneralization. In general, I agree, but not always.
While most AI-generated content is not going to appeal to most people, it's wrong to say that all AI-generated music is not about what music is about. Personally I find _some_ AI generated music to be amazingly fun to listen to, but mostly it's parodies or works that are essentially built on top of existing media.
A creative person using AI well can produce art that people enjoy and which adds to our culture (I selectively choose not to say "create" here to avoid that very overloaded connotation w.r.t. AI creations). That is not to say that most of the work that comes out of AI needs to exist or does any of those things.
> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it
"art is in the eye of the beholder."
I listen to a lot of EDM, which can be very mechanical, but I personally have strong emotional connection to. I personally would welcome AI-generated music as an alternative to human-made.
To be clear: I do agree a "human-verified" system would be great, but I don't think it would be black and white. And I would guess that eventually AI music will be better than a lot of human made music.
I made (what would eventually get called) EDM in high school and a lot of what I enjoyed was dismissed as “not real music”. It’s not a musician playing it, but a computer! Unless a guitarist was plucking strings or a pianist hitting the keys, it wasn’t “real”.
Doesn’t matter how carefully crafted it was: it’s only real if you couldn’t hit “play”. Sorry, Mike Oldfield. Hate to break it to you that you’re a fake musician.
I agree with you. I do enjoy some live musicians jamming on a stage, but for a lot of the genres I frequently listen to, I’d have no way of knowing if a song was written by human or by AI. If it’s good, it’s good.
I learned music production by first learning how to produce house. Because of this, I can confidently say that house is not music. You literally just copy/paste over and over. Just because a human makes something, doesn't make it good or "music" necessarily.
> I can confidently say that house is not music.
Hey, this is really fucking stupid.
I would respect it if he followed up with “the only real music is dubstep”.
People engage with music in different ways. Some people focus on lyrics and the connection they make. Other people largely ignore lyrics and focus on the rhythms and patterns. Both are valid and both are very human. We do not need gatekeepers coming in and judging what is music and what is not music.
House music can bring me as much joy as listening to Bach performed by a skilled ensemble. It depends on where I am at mentally. Both are valid forms of human expression.
It's pretty clear you didn't get beyond the very basics of music production or house music if you think this. I'd love to hear your masterfully produced house track to prove me wrong, though.
And yet there are well respected composers who intentionally copy/paste. Repetition is key to minimalism, for instance.
Their approach of "manually tagging songs that are good 'non-AI' and not good 'AI'" is a questionable approach from an engineering and product perspective.
They would benefit much more from a have a better recommendation and ranking algorithm that carefully monitors all metrics, recommends high-performers, and excludes unpopular content from the feed.
You can use the fact it was AI-generated as a signal, but it is just a signal among other criterias, not an outright ban.
Essentially, explore songs and artists, exploit winners.
-> Downrank( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit )
Then you judge the popularity of a song, an album, a creator, a playlist, etc not its creation method. Exactly like a genre type. It's not because you don't like country music that everybody should be forbidden to listen to country music.
It's good for them too, the more streams they do, the more money they get, and the more their audience is engaged. If the person doesn’t like “AI-generated genre” then just downrank it heavily on its recommandation feed, like YouTube or TikTok does.
I believe we've already crossed the quality threshold for being equal to or "better" (subjective) than human.
For EDM, check out the AI artist "Vibfy". Especially the song "I Hear You" as it has the best mastering so far. The melody and vocals of all the songs are fire, but in some of the earlier songs the mastering is sub-par with strange volume changes and muddy beats.
There is an AI folk band called "We're all f*cked" that is incredibly good and indistinguishable from actual humans.
You will probably be able to listen to machine-generated music on most major platforms. I just hope there’s one which excludes all of that.
Personally I think it’s a bit like cultural junk food: it has the appearance of real food, but leaves one hungry afterward. Which really isn’t all that surprising – music isn’t just some random collection of patterns, it’s intimately tied to real culture. Current AI software is only ever going to copy and regurgitate human culture, not make meaningful creations from scratch.
I agree with the other poster. I think it's very difficult to guide this missile so that it blows up AI-generated music and doesn't blow up EDM.
My own taste in music is pretty junk-food-y I guess. Electronic music and not the pretentious kind. Dubstep, electro. Give me something that goes wub-wub. Incidentally, I think this experience mostly isn't one about human connection? Like, there is some circuit in my brain that likes that sound and wants to be tickled.
I can play classical piano to a mediocre standard. I listen to it and enjoy it occasionally. But, honestly, what I feel like my spirit needs is something that goes wub-wub and I think that space is densely seeded enough that maybe we can scale back human involvement in producing it.
Sure that’s fair, and maybe my ideal platform doesn’t really work for electronic music and works better for singer-songwriters that perform live. Which is fine - I just like the idea of a platform that guarantees that a real person made this music.
junk food is a common misconception about electronic music with ppl who have only listened to trash versions of it on social media.
I don’t mean electronic music writ large, I mean AI generated music.
Electronic music is probably my favorite genre, broadly. But there’s a human behind the machine, not a random collection of patterns. To use a concrete example: NIN is about 1000% more interesting because of who Trent Reznor is, and not because it’s merely good music.
This disconnect is much more of an issue with say, country or bluegrass or jazz. To divorce those from the musician and their cultural context is to miss the whole point.
There's a human behind AI-generated music too. A human writes the prompts. Your distinction seems rather arbitrary.
Typing “make me an electronic guitar song about a bad breakup” is a whole lot different than learning to play the instrument yourself and conveying your own emotions from your real experience into a song that you write and perform.
If you can’t see how these are fundamentally different things, I don’t know what to tell you.
I think a lot of songs about bad break-ups were written by talented musicians without actual experience of a bad break-up, riffing on the corpus of songs they'd heard about bad break-ups.
Like, a lot of times you're just engaging with someone's desire to have made a song, and what they felt about some songs that someone else made.
You are describing empathy, a human experience.
Even if you generate the soundtrack, if you set the lyrics it can be great music. At least for one person, who chose the lyrics. I set some poems on music and I absolutely love the results.
Do you really think that's the only way to do it? I spend hours refining the output, slicing things up, redoing certain parts, tossing it into the DAW and compressing, adding effects, etc. I mean, if you think one shot prompts are the only way to use AI to make music fine, but you're being intentionally obtuse.
AI music != electronic music.
Most AI music is actually country-pop ballads and indie folk.
Making electronic music with AI is hard and it isn't very good at it.
YouTube is already recommending tons of AI-generated electronic music. It's pretty easy to spot: It will have millions of views and the "artist's" discography will only go back to 2025 or 2026. It's usually just singles. The cover art is vague atmospheric AI-generated. The "artist" will have no presence online save for a couple instagram account with a couple posts that are also AI-generated.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all, I'm saying electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song.
AI can't do "robotic" math music, it's best at sappy generic emotive stuff. (I guess this isn't at all a surprise for those that know how the musical sausage is made.)
As I stated elsewhere in the thread, the streaming platforms do not have the correct incentives to do this. It’s the labels that do releases that are correctly incentivized, as they need to build an audience that trusts them and enjoys the music that they release.
Independently-released music is a huge red flag. If you can’t find a single label A&R to support you, you may have to work on the quality of your output… music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are tens of thousands of labels across nearly every imaginable genre. Their role as gatekeeper is a valuable one.
> Independently-released music is a huge red flag.
You've never listened to anything on Soundcloud and found it good?
The vast majority of music I listen to on SoundCloud is released on small labels (<10, <100, or <1000 artists). It is not that hard to release on those labels. There are tens of thousands artists releasing on thousands of labels every Friday.
That being said, I guess I may have some genre bias. Maybe it’s exceedingly difficult to get signed to a small label as e.g. a Midwest Emo Band (bad example because I have friends who released on a small label as a Midwest Emo Band). But you need to put in the effort if you expect me to give you my precious listening time.
Edit: redundancy
> Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically
Don't give ticketmaster any ideas.
A platform like that exists. It's called Subvert. It's a cooperative that was created as a response whenever Bandcamp has changed ownership several times. The idea of Subvert is to focus on the artists instead of the interests of the founders and investors.
Baudelaire and many others said the same thing about photography.
You’re gonna have to be more specific. They said what same thing?
Perhaps. But just how human made? We already had the “Depeche Mode isn’t real music because they just push play on a sequencer” debate 40 years ago.
And lots of composers can’t play the stuff they write. But the composition is human.
Then there’s emerging AI-supported music, since AI can come up with and test harmonic ideas far more sophisticated than most people. If a human’s saying “no, not that, try using an augmented sixth to get us from F#maj to Cmin”, is that human generated?
Not trying to be contrary, just saying the definition needs to be really clear, and that’s going to be difficult.
What I had in mind was, "perform it on your instruments in our studio and we'll record the performance, record the music, and add it to our platform."
Probably too expensive to scale, but... it's an idea.
That seems like a hard line to draw for EDM, which I suppose, plenty of people have indeed refused to class as "human-made" over the years.
You'd probably need to be more generally back-to-basics (instruments-only, no EDM).
To me it’s less about the technologies used to produce the audio. If a human has put some creative effort into it, even if it’s mostly curating AI-generated audio, I’m in principle fine with that. But if little to no effort was put into it, it’s slop by definition.
That would be interesting and could start simply. CDBaby was what, $20 per record and self-serve. Maybe each record on this new platform costs $200 and is accompanied by an employee-uploaded video of the artist uploading the record.
Your statement is so imprecise as to be meaningless. Is EDM made on an Abelton DAW human made? Even though the human didn't touch an instrument and used a robot drummer? What about a human who uses AI to generate snippets of music and then pastes them together in an emotionally compelling way, much like HipHop artists do for traditionally sampled music? AI is a tool. Low/no-effort work on the part of humans is the problem.
Do you really think the vast majority of AI music is going to be akin to old school hip hop sampling culture?
I certainly don’t, and I think it’s pretty likely that the vast majority will be the generic derivative slop.
Which is why I’d like a separate platform, so I don’t have to waste my time wading through all the garbage.
As of now, you can tell the difference for most AI generated music. There's some where you cannot. There is no Turing Test for taste, and the specific constellation of features that represent your particular interpretation of what things like human, best, goodness, excellence, beauty, and any other label you might apply to abstract qualities will be reproduced at a sufficiently high resolution that you will no longer be able to meaningfully discern between human and AI creations. In a blind test, you will prefer the AI product, and your own perceptions and biases will convince you that the AI generation is actually human, because whatever ineffable abstractions you attribute to "human" quality will be replicated, refined, and exploited.
The very act of recognizing some difference is the tool with which the next generation of outputs is refined, until it's so "good" for any and all particular instances of "good" that human perception is insufficient to differentiate the source.
At some point we're going to have to admit that the distinction based on source is a problem, and perhaps there's a lot of nuance in the context of any particular piece of media such that an arbitrary dismissal of a song, or image, or piece of writing, for the mere reason that AI was used to produce it in whole or in part is missing the point.
If you enjoy a song, your enjoyment is real. If you appreciate beauty, your perception of beauty is real. If you feel deeply about a written text, your feelings are real.
How you perceive things, while not entirely conscious, does involve elements of choice. Make the choice to judge things on meaningful merit, and if the next generation of musicians and artists use AI tools to explore new territory, don't dismiss their art and passion and creations out of hand.
An electric guitar is artificial. People used to make the same sorts of "that's not music" statements people are making now about music and art. Imagine being so twisted up over some arbitrary distinction that you miss out on Jimi Hendrix or BB King, or Joe Satriani, or any of the brilliant musicians that have wrung beauty and soul from "artificial" electronic signals.
There was an interesting study recently which showed that if you put a human-written short story up against an AI-written short story, the AI wins. But if you put an anthology of AI-written short stories up against an anthology of human-written stories, the human-written anthology wins.
I see the same thing in music. I accidentally clicked on a couple of AI albums in YouTube. On a minute-by-minute basis they aren't necessarily bad. But if you keep listening, even though the stream is nominally an hour long, it's the same couple of minutes over and over again, more or less.
In the case of music I could see a coder preferring that for their background noise, but for direct listening for its own sake, once the initial impression wears off there isn't anything left.
I'm not necessarily saying this from an anti-AI position, either. This is just the current reality of the situation. At the moment, AI art has a very flattening effect.
What's more, I spent some time at Suno and tried to get it off the beaten track. I was able to get it to create broken music with chopped up words and instruments that were confused about what they were by trying to make an excessively-interesting combination of genres. It broke before I could get anything really interesting going on musically. Possibly if someone spent a lot of time with the higher-touch music tracking tools they could get something interesting happening but I had enough of the same problems there that I bailed. Even if you try to inject your own inspiration, the AI has a very strong flattening effect.
Text I think you could probably do better with. I have not tried to write fiction but I've done a lot of non-fiction writing with it at work. But no matter how I prompt it, it is always flabby. I can style-shift it away from Default LLM Voice, and it's at least somewhat more concise than that, but I can't get it to be truly concise.
I think most of what you’ve written here only really applies if you listen to music without knowing anything about the musician.
That seems pretty uncommon to me, for most people. The most popular musicians in the world are basically celebrity characters, with the music as a key ingredient, not the only one. Do Taylor Swift fans or Kanye fans or [musician] fans just listen to the music and not follow the person? Pretty unlikely IMO.
I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.
> That seems pretty uncommon to me, for most people. The most popular musicians in the world are basically celebrity characters, with the music as a key ingredient, not the only one. Do Taylor Swift fans or Kanye fans or [musician] fans just listen to the music and not follow the person? Pretty unlikely IMO.
Yes, and AI music generation (like auto-tune before it) enables people to choose their celebrities from a wider pool than "the type of dork who practices guitar for 10000 hours".
Frankly, this is also how I mostly listen to music - I set a song or two I like, then I let auto-discovery keep adding to the list.
If I happen to like it, I hit thumbs up/like. Otherwise I ignore it.
I sometimes go through and browse musicians, mainly to see if they have other songs I might like, but generally speaking... it's not high on my list of priorities. Then again, I don't give a shit about the "pop" aspect of music at all. It's mainly background noise I put on while doing something else.
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As an aside:
> I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.
I think this is where it gets weird, and I think you're pretty solidly incorrect here. Samplers and grooveboxes absolutely play music by themselves. I think there's also a weird world where things like "Girl Talk" are somewhat spiritual successors to AI music...
Ex - I definitely love girl talk, and I'm not in any way implying that those albums don't take skill and taste, but he's literally just playing samples of other artists. If that's real music (and I'd argue strongly that it IS real music) then I think I struggle to rule out AI generated songs that are edited by someone (and if you've used this tooling, it still requires lots of editing).
> Samplers and grooveboxes absolutely play music by themselves.
I disagree. You cannot take your Akai MPC out of the box and ask it to play music. You have to load samples, you have to arrange them and you have to instruct it to play. That seems like a far cry to me from "playing themselves." You still have to... write the music.
> Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself.
And a model does not play good music by itself. Only slop if your contribution is nil. Models are more like pianos than parrots.
You're correct that AI will probably end up producing the majority of music no one cares about. Like the muzak you hear on elevators. Or for people that just put on a playlist at work and don't really care much beyond having some background noise.
When you're paying attention, and if you actually care about art and music as human expression, then it will matter. And maybe AI music will still "fool" someone then. Maybe we'll discover the next Michael Jackson was just prompting their way to the top of the charts. But that won't really be the point, just like it wasn't the point when everyone discovered that Milli Vanilli were faking it.
People don't like liars. And using AI to generate art is lying. You didn't make it, the AI that did make it was only possible because it collectively stole from every human musician and artist before it. You can wrap it up however you like, but at the end of the day its just a lie.
And yeah there's some nuance here. Lets take Milli Vanilli for example. They were considered frauds because they weren't actually singing on their tracks. What if they had been singing, but using autotune? I don't know where you draw the line but for me its somewhere around people who have no appreciation of the amount of effort that goes into producing art that think they can create it whole cloth from a couple of prompts.
> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it.
Music is about making my brain feel good. I don't care what/who makes it. If I like it, I like it.
Consumption vs. Appreciation in a single pair of comments, what a beautiful dichotomy of the human experience of art.
AI music has taken over small businesses like coffee shops and restaurants. AI music drives me nuts because, to me, it still is very much deep in an uncanny valley. That said, I can't blame the businesses because they are all (dis)incentive driven.
The music industry has stepped up its efforts globally to crack down on small businesses that play copyrighted music. They actually hire people to go into these places and spot violations.
People blame social media for the death of the monoculture but I think music rights holders have done a fair share of the damage to themselves.
This is all about streaming platforms commandeering royalties away from artists.
The way royalties get assigned is based on a percentage of your listening versus your monthly payment.
For example, spend an entire month listening to Taylor Swift’s new album, she gets the entire royalty share.
But if you listen to the album 100 times but then listen to lofi beats 900 times, Taylor only gets 10%.
The “earnings per stream” number you’ll see cited is only an average and varies greatly because there’s only so much money to go around since your listening is unlimited.
But now you have services like Spotify that are removing real songs from “mood” playlists and replacing them with AI music that directs royalties toward Spotify.
Another factor that has happened: record labels have been working to screw over artists so much that they actually negotiated lower royalty rates with Spotify in exchange for company stock.
Giving up royalties but then instead owning a part of Spotify effectively directs money away artists and toward the labels.
For me personally, I no longer hear the difference between AI generated music and new pop-songs. Not sure what that says about me or the music industry.
> between AI generated music and new pop-songs
I think food is a good analogy here. This is a bit like saying I can’t tell the difference between the McDonald’s that is 90% automated and the McDonald’s that’s 20% automated. You’re still just talking about McDonald’s, which is manufactured and engineered to deliver a very specific taste and flavor.
Pop music, almost by definition, is not innovative. Consider the experimental bleeding edge that pushes the evolution of genres. Eventually, that experimental sound enters the pop cycle. Off the top of my head, Fred Again was innovative in 2022, Kettama was innovative in 2025. Fred’s already pop-adjacent, if not full on directly impacting the pop industry at this point. If you want slightly older examples, I would give you Skrillex circa 2010, or Zedd circa 2014.
This is like how I can't tell the difference between good wine and mediocre wine. It's not a skill I have a desire to develop.
It develops itself once you drink wine frequently enough.
Why don’t they play indie alternative pop music? It’s easier than ever to create, surely there are many bands with almost no audience who would give away their music for free. The reason may be discovery, but they could band together and make a centralized platform.
Because then the coffee shop has to curate it or the band needs to market to the coffee shop.
Incentives are mismatched here - the indie band benefits from being noticed and sought out, the coffee shop wants to set a vibe without distracting or irritating anyone (which music can do simply by repeating, if you don't curate a large enough collection).
So unless your playlist is, like, part of the product you're selling (which it is for a number of coffee shops to be fair), you just look for something like "10 hours of lo-fi beats to study to" and throw it on.
The indie band in France also collect subsidies from "SACEM" AND "SPRE" (and YouTubeurs from "SCAM").
With SACEM, if you have a cafe, then you have to pay 4000 USD per year to support musicians, etc etc.
Of course, this is only broadcasting rights, you have to acquire the music (or rent it) on a B2B platform.
If you play AI Lofi in theory you don't have to, but don't worry that inspectors will find a way to fine you.
Ironically, the human band you are playing will get zero, and it will go to the big rich and popular artists.
I just want Tidal and Spotify to give me the option to fully opt-out of AI generated music. I don't want it mixed in with my music. If others want it great, but I want the option to not engage with the content.
I feel the same way, but it’s hard to draw the line: - was the song totally one-shot “make me a song in the style of X?” - was it a legit artist that used AI to create a verse lyric stanza after they’d already created the entirety of the melody/ chords etc?
I would go with, if the song could be reasonably performed live by the human publishing it, and have a similar sound to the recording, then its fine to keep in. The issue I have is songs like this one, where there is no way anyone could even try to perform it
https://open.spotify.com/track/0jGJtiDfEO9syfSL8AshBF?si=b92...
That doesn't really work for electronic music though.
Electronic or not, whether messing with a buchla or producing via vsts and changing knobs around still ends up with a human feel and human choices in a way AI music doesn't.
And what about the line between triggers or samples? I can play some impossible AI music if I sample the impossible parts and just say it's a sample played on a synth or whatever.
It’s not even limited to “electronic” music. Consider that sound engineers work with hundreds of layers on a single track to engineer a very specific sound. Then a pop star adds vocals. Then those vocals are engineered beyond recognition. Sometimes if the vocalist is talented enough they go on tour and then perform with minimal after-effects, and sometimes they lipsync.
It would be a shades of gray situation, but I think of this performance by Skrillex where he is mixing live, and thats what I would expect from a live EDM performance. There should be a line between a EDM artist, and a DJ
https://youtu.be/hb0XLX0b4Y4
Sure but a producer has never needed to be able to be a live artist. Making the music is the only requirement and that totally fine.
This is the key point, they're all enforcing tagging with no means to filter it out entirely.
Agreed. Especially since there is similar functionality for explicit tracks
Nothing personal, but there's something hilarious about "I demand a quick and easy solution to a likely practically impossible problem once you get into details" -- in opposition to AI.
This isn't a problem which needs to be solved perfectly, at least in this context. If some electronic music creators (using 2015 level technology) get reduced play and some fully AI music gets through the filters it's really fine.
I'm a Tidal subscriber, something like this is needed.
My Tidal "feed" is full of new releases that are clearly AI-generated. They use the same artist name as artists that I really like, but the music is clearly not from the artist as advertised.
I have no problem with AI-generated music, I just don't want someone trying to spoof the artists I am interested in.
This is a discovery problem, and all the streaming platforms are trash at discovery because discovery is a long tail problem. That’s where record labels shine because of individualized A&R and tastemakers, which is why record label consolidation is antithetical to quality music output (edit: and diverse).
However, you’ll also notice that none of these streaming platforms highlight which record label is responsible for which release, though you can find it under additional info sometimes. Tin foil hat is that the large record companies don’t want such a feature to be present on streaming platforms. But more likely is that product employees at streaming platforms don’t think users care about record labels, which they’re right, 80% of users don’t currently care about which record label releases which track or recording.
Give me a streaming platform with “Label” as a first class entity that I can like, follow, etc. My theory is that it will produce a much healthier long tail, because trustworthy labels are already a robust source of non-AI music.
I agree. I think it's also a curation, taste, and trust problem, which is where the record labels can step in and shine.
Spotify is the same. This impersonation ought to be illegal.
Do you have some impersonated artist names I would be able to look up? This isn't a thing I have (knowingly) run into on Spotify yet and I'm really curious to see more
Yes (as in the band Yes) on Tidal at one point had a bunch of probably-AI-generated albums that Tidal shoved into Yes' discography because the “artist” included “Yes” in the name (with album titles like “Yes, it's raining” and other such nonsense). Thankfully it seems Tidal's cleaned those out.
"Yes" and "BT". I've also some across some AI-generated slop under the name "Rush". There's someone releasing a new track almost every day as "BT" that is clearly not "BT".
I didn't see the naming issue that the other reply had with "Yes", but I do frequently see their name pop up with slop.
I'm pretty sure it is. Effective enforcement is a different matter.
It is illegal. Anybody making money on that is using the artist's image without permission. Anybody who spent money on it has been defrauded.
> Tidal defines AI-generated music as music that is wholly or substantially generated by generative artificial intelligence.
I think this needs more clarity. I can think of a lot of different ways AI is used in music today as a part of the song generation process and not sure whether or not this definition would apply to it. They specifically mention developments in "text-prompted generation" but if anything that confuses the issue more, for example what about training on specific music.
This isn't a comment on how expansive or narrow the definition should be, just that they need to spell it out more to allow for consistent application (to say nothing of enforcement). If someone uses ChatGPT for lyrics, but writes the instrumentals themselves, does this policy apply? I genuinely have no idea.
+1 - and what about an entirely AI generated song with a human who adds a 0.1 sec hum. Or even this hum is copypasted from another human generated song.
Allow AI, but require labeling as such, and demonetize.
Would love for YouTube to follow suit on this
Would you really like to take action and earn less money? Morality is dead...
What connection to morality is there from taking action and earning less money? I can think of many morally positive situations that would match this odd vague phrasing you're presenting.
I commend Tidal for at least trying.
I wish Youtube Music would offer some relief from the flood of AI music on their platform. My frustrations with YTM are exacerbated by the fact that it has the absolute minimum in functionality when it comes to browsing or searching.
I don't understand the user hostile nature of so many services these days when it comes to content discovery. We all know the data is there, but making it available for the user to actually browse or god forbid a modicum of search filters is like some forbidden fruit.
The detection problem is genuinely hard. Even desktop AI agents I've been working with recently can control Spotify, fill forms, navigate apps — all indistinguishable from human interaction at the OS level. If that's hard to detect at the application layer, detecting AI-generated music at the audio layer seems like a cat and mouse game that Tidal will struggle to win without self-reporting from uploaders.
I feel like audio-level heuristics will be easier, but ultimately who's to say?
> Generative models synthesize sound mathematically. These synthesis methods leave unnatural dips, specific spectral noise profiles, or phase alignments that rarely occur in real, human-recorded audio
Then the slop merchants will simply move to controlling a DAW with AI and use the same software synths that everyone else does. It's a little more involved and slower, but far from hard.
Ultimately this isn't really solvable without a way of marking audio with a verifiable signature that it was produced by a specific human, with some kind of reputation algorithm.
This is a totally fascist musical bias -- I have been using spectral techniques in music since the late 1980s. It has been common for decades. "Unnatural" spectral packet distortion is a component of a wide-breadth of existing music that pre-dates modern generative AI. I am confident that the false positives will be overwhelming and unfair to many artists. Such a cowardly and lossy solution.
You are correct, but I think having a good policy - and trying earnestly to enforce it - is a good start, even if that enforcement is very imperfect.
Maybe if enough AI produces self-report their work as AI, and enough non-AI producers are honest about uploading non-AI work, they'll quickly have the necessary amount of good-enough data to train good classifiers?
I mean you can outsource it to users, which also allows you to organically make exceptions for AI music that is actually popular.
You really just want your users, who hate AI, to see a big "REPORT AI" button they can click. The problem you are trying to solve is the perception among your users that your platform is dominated by AI slop. So at the end of the day the only thing you actually have to figure out is what your users think is AI slop, have a quick trigger on un-popular stuff, and basically never enforce on popular stuff unless there is actually some controversy.
Let's go with impossible.
I've been a Tidal subscriber for several years, and while I've not seen much of the AI music problem (yet), there's been a big issue with people getting their music intentionally or unintentionally labelled under other artists names. The platform has had some odd technical hiccups too over the past year, so I've started wondering how many people are left actually maintaining it all (there were layoffs pretty recently).
Same here, and I've run into annoying technical issues too. I am on the verge of canceling, but this new AI-skeptical stance makes me want to give them another chance. Sometimes I like to listen to their stations instead of my own playlists, but if you leave them on long enough they will eventually start playing obvious AI slop. If they actually figure out how to let me filter out ALL AI generated music, then I will be a happy customer even when their app throws meaningless error codes at me instead of playing music.
Makes sense for them as a business, but still a bummer to have AI music mixed in with human music at all. To me there is literally no point to AI music. Music is communication. The artist is communicating with the listener through a pretty unique and magical asynchronous medium. AI (as we know it today) can't meet that bar and so it does not meet my definition of music.
The whole “what is art” question has different answers for different people. Yes, for some, music is communication, but when I listen to metal in the gym it’s an adrenaline boost. When I listen to brain.fm, it’s for focus. When I listen to a rap song with an MC that’s great at storytelling, then it’s communication. Sometimes it’s just a utility though. I’ve played music for about 30 years - live, in bands, in my bedroom - played many instruments, written electronic music, made lots of noises. But I’m not always trying to communicate something. In fact I’m sometimes scared I don’t have anything good to say with my music. So I just play it.
I agree in sentiment, I love knowing that another human made this, either because I fancy I could maybe do something as good as that, or because I just admire the talent, or simply because the lyrics or music touch me somehow.
That said, there are a lot of people who simply enjoy having something playing in the background, it doesn't matter what, and if you're into country music it's great to have 10,000+ hours of country music to play.
If Tidal provides a checkbox so you can choose whether to exclude AI content, I think that would work for both audiences.
I wonder if we are gonna see an emerging market where musicians are hired to provide support for AI music farms, I feel like gig musicians can easily cover/learn to play anything without much trouble
This would then become something similar to how legal tech where a license is required to practice law relies on a few lawyers sitting as a gate after the AI
That's a genuinely grim thought, but not unrealistic either. I'll have to chew on that one, it's interesting.
I do have a music recommendation from a live person. After check was not a real person, it was quite a popular ai artist doing funk music.
Here we are. music is great, people do not suspect it's ai, artist behind AI is making money. Real work, real people are happy. It's just the voice and instruments are not real. How is it different from club music made in fruity loops? This music is just more complicated, hence no fruity loop. With AI you don't need to assemble the entire band do to funk music. Isn't that democratize access to music production?
> artist behind AI is making money. Real work, real people are happy.
I would not call someone typing words into a prompt an "artist" doing "real work", and they definitely should not be monetizing it.
Interestingly, this is a 404 if you're logged into Tidal.
Works for me (TM). Maybe you lost CDN-lottery?
I had the same issue when logged in. I opened a private tab and it worked.
Works for me, they also emailed it to me this morning
I'm a musician by hobby, but used to make a living of it in my younger days. AI music has come to stay, can't do anything about it - the cat is out of the bag.
I know professional musicians that will use AI models like Suno as an aid to their tracks - mostly where they'd previously use samples or program things themselves. In these cases, where the track may be x% AI and (1-x)% Human performance, where x is very small, I think monetization or even copyright shouldn't be too difficult.
But I also know people that use tools like Suno for everything, where every single aspect of the song: Lyrics, music, production is all done by AI tools. They basically just prompt some style and vibe they want, and will upload the result. In these cases, I don't think monetization or copyright should be possible.
Then again, it is difficult to know how much AI someone used to generate their tracks, so I'm not sure how this could be enforced. I also know people that are earning very good money off their (entirely) Suno-generated tracks.
I have a great solution. They can point chatGPT to their AI generated slop and get AI generated enjoyment from others appreciating their "Art". Meanwhile, keep that out of my sphere.
Honestly I don't know that I care about AI generated tracks, like you said it's the same argument one could make for samples or drum machines or synths or a dozen other previous technologies in the music space. What I actually miss is music curation and discovery, instead of a just a giant slop-pile of new music that I can't possible sort through, or an algorithm defines for me.
I'd love some Internet Pirate Radio. If someone wants to sort through the best all-AI tracks and run those, that'd be cool. I don't want an AI to pick the best AI tracks.
Just got the email announcement this morning:
> AI music generation tools are changing how music is created and distributed. As this technology evolves, Tidal is introducing platform standards to protect artists, their craft, and inform listeners.
> Here are the highlights of our new AI Policy:
> - 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.
> - We will expand these policies to music that is substantially AI-generated when AI detection technology is sufficiently reliable to do so.
> You'll start seeing these changes from July 15.
> Check out the full policy here. To learn more, please visit our FAQ.
> For the music,
> The Tidal Team
All in all seems reasonable. There's definitely been a wave of cheap slop flooding Tidal's library lately and removing the incentives for it seems like the exact correct approach to stemming that tide.
The only thing worrying to me is the use of “AI detection technology”; that stuff is notorious for both false positives and false negatives, and it seems to only be getting worse as AI is getting better at hiding its “tells”. As long as there's an appeals process with a human in the loop it should work out fine.
I'm also curious about how they'll define “substantially AI-generated”, i.e. where they'll draw that line. Human vocals over an AI backing track? AI vocals over a human backing track? All human performers, but using instruments with AI-generated sounds?
lets see who is going to win, AI or Artists? I'm going to stick with real artists, even if some of them use ghost producers.
Some of this is sensible. The copyright authority (can't recall right this moment what it is called in the US) has said only works by human beings are copyrightable. A good argument is that therefore there is no reason to pay royalties on AI generated work as it is the equivalent to public domain.
Take away the attraction to the grifters and you reduce the issue.
Of course this does not eliminate the problem of the streaming platforms tolertating AI generated work so that they do not need to pay as much out for your subscription fee.
Personally, if there were a decent Spotify alternative that had a zero tolerance to gen AI policy, I'd switch without a second thought.
> A good argument is that therefore there is no reason to pay royalties on AI generated work as it is the equivalent to public domain.
That has some different second order consequences that I don't think you're seeing. It's not that they will be free to you as a user, it's more that they will be free from the platform perspective to do whatever they want with the revenue they get from it.
Say for example you have a platform with Spotify monetization scheme for instance, which is already very unfair to small artists. But now imagine you have to compete to be included on auto play or playlists against something that's basically free for Spotify, what's your chance of getting any money out of it? Say Spotify changes their algorithm and starts pushing 20% of all auto play playlists to consist of AI songs, that's basically a 20% bump on their profit basis.
Headline should read "Tidal will not pay royalties to AI music"
Given that Tidal will likely, and ironically, utilize AI to determine what music is considered AI, the decision to block monetization of AI categorized music is likely also unfair to artists who use spectral DSP and/or sample from AI generated sources though largely compose music in a manner similar to other common computer mediated music studio workflows. Such music may very well land in the realm of false positives. This is another step by streaming platforms which funnels and restricts musical creativity.
Cool stuff. I love AI music. Listen to it all day while writing code or whatever. Most of the time it’s the outrun or vaporwave like 1 hr playlists on YouTube and then I have a few Suno songs I’m fond of when I feel a specific mood strike me.
It’s pretty cool technology. You just ask for a certain feeling to be evoked and you can have it done. Magical.
Same, although I prefer Endel. It’s a paid subscription, but their objective-focused playlists work really well for me. Relax, Focus, Deep Focus… very effective.
This is so surprising coming from Tidal - their entire business was built on high-fidelity, crediting artists, and paying them more
It seems consistent to me. I'm not sure if suno represents the state of the art, but the output I've heard from there seems to be noticeably lower fidelity than a skilled amateur recording. In many cases, it's still more than good enough. But Tidal advertises things like "lossless", which is a much higher fidelity threshold than anything suno can produce, at least that I've heard. Crediting artists might be taken to mean crediting human artists whose creative output is represented by the music. Sending royalties to "AI musicians" displaces some of those potential payments.
I suppose. To me, Tidal was always on the side of artists rather than big faceless studios. Now there's an even bigger, even more faceless entity - and it's surprising to me that Tidal is giving them a platform rather than blocking it entirely
The policy seems a lot more reasonable than the straight up dystopian scam that Spotify runs, but I am surprised that there isn’t any streaming service that’s marketing heavy on “no AI allowed” considering the percentage of people who are against AI. Seems like small players like Tidal could make some headway with marketing like that.
Isn’t it subjective what “substantially” may mean to them.
If you use ai tools not for full generation of a song but perhaps a bass track would they allow monetizing?
I have serious doubts that their detection will be good enough, especially in cases where it's not 100% AI generated. The EDM and hip hop genres relies heavily on samples, and I guarantee all the sample services all being pumped full of AI generated creations. Many artists using the sample won't even know they using things that are AI generated.
> Tidal will accept AI-generated music.
Okey, that's all I needed to know. They could just put this one sentence in the doc and be done with it.
Tidal has declared that AI music will now be more profitable to them .
How are they going to detect the AI music?
Maybe licensing existing tech, e.g. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/01/ai-generated-music-deeze...
RFC 3514 is being repurposed as an "AI Bit", all AI-generated content will be required to set this bit during transfers.
How is this enforceable?
That's the joke of RFC 3514. Setting the evil bit of a packet to 0 means it is harmless and no defensive action should be taken. Secure systems should defend against packets with the evil bit set to 1. Insecure systems may choose to crash, be penetrated, etc.
I cannot wait. Just in time for next year.
Coming soon in 276 days from now.
Love that they don't pay any royalties for AI music right now, unlike Spotify.
So, their incentive is to promote AI music, since they don't have to pay royalties for them.
How so? People want to avoid it.
I don't agree with the overall point, but what they are saying is that if Tidal makes a "lofi hip hop mix beats" playlist, then they have to pay a nickel to an artist if they direct the user to their song, but NOTHING if they direct to someone who uploaded an AI song. So that's an extra nickel of profit for pointing to the AI song.
In reality, I don't think this is how it'll shake out. But it's a valid argument.
True, though it seems like at least 75% of the traffic on various social media and streaming sites is content that people want to avoid, yet there it is.
Listeners will likely want to avoid it.
But "creators" pushing AI music won't tag their slop as such because they want to monetize (surprise, they're not doing it for the love of the game).
So this hinges on Tidal being able to reliably identify AI-generated music.
I like what I see from their policy. They accept that it’s part of the industry landscape and also say it’s not monetizeable. They will likely revisit and revise their stance as things change.
I strongly agree on labeling the generated content.
That's fair, allow AI slop but tag obvious AI slop as such. Hopefully they add an option to hide detected AI slop, something I wish Youtube had for instance.
Also they aren't paying out for AI generated content.
Interesting discussion with Jeff Bridges on Suno: https://x.com/adityarao310/status/2071488913630204209/video/...
Am I the only one getting a "Page not found"?
Edit: Nevermind, see riddley's comment. That's what I get for being logged in, I guess?
Good now add a setting to hide all AI content.
It will be super premium pro plan:)
Maybe on a less expensive super premium plus plan, you only see ai-generated content, but it’s at the highest quality streaming tier.
A very reasonable policy, prevents AI Slop from flooding the platform due to misaligned creator / consumer incentives
An interesting problem in the background of this is the cope.
Which is to say, there are a lot of people who think "they can tell AI" in music, wherein you can cue the famous picture of the airplane with the bulletholes.
I'm not sure what you can do about it, and part of me hates it too -- but youtube has absolutely given me 100% AI generated music that's full of soul and better than, say, Bruno Mar,s IMHO.
(For those interested, my two examples would be the gospel "Thong Song" and the fake rock-n-roll dis track against 50 cent "by TI's Son," 2 quarters...)
The main thing that I learned from this is that Tidal is still alive.
Anyway the battle with slop is curation. Eurodance by AI is as shitty as eurodance by humans.
A tide of slop.
> Tidal will accept AI-generated music
Tl;dr. Another one bites the dust.
it won't be monetized so there's zero incentive to upload AI slop to Tidal
There is only zero incentive if the filter detects AI music reliably. It's still a race between effective detection and cost to generate content, isn't it?
Suno et al don't really have a incentive to hide the fact that their tracks are generated using AI. Quite the contrary, the only way they won't get sued to death by UMG and the other big labels is to disclose AI generated tracks.
Doesn't Warner Music own Suno?
Why would someone doing that voluntarily tag their content as AI? they can make money by hiding it.
Unless they directly embed promotions in it. I could see this being an avenue for brand-derived fake artists. I wonder if they already have a policy for that and I wonder why it wouldn’t apply to, say, the beastie boys talking about adidas.
They say only wholly produced music using AI can't be monetized, nothing stopping it's 95% AI and 5% Human. Also no concerete definitions of what that even means.
I think that they mentioned both wholly produced music or substantially produced music. I think that it will be a fuzzy line but for example in the case of 95% AI and 5% human probably won't work.
It won't be monetized until they create a new monetization policy where they get a greater revenue share from it.
Funny, Tidal want pay royalties on it.
Why demonetize? What if people wants to pay for AI music? What about the long tail? There is a market for everything, just label it and let it be.
If there's a market, then a competitor app with different policies will likely arise.
The other aspect that's missing from the discussion here is LEGAL. If Tidal is making money from stolen music -- although arguably they still are by offering it on a subscription basis -- then that opens them up to litigation. From that perspective, this may double both as risk-mitigation and also a marketing opportunity for them, would love an attorney to weigh in there.
(From the comments here, Spotify is the market leader and already pays out for AI generated music. But I can't say that independently.)
Then support your favorite AI music creators by going to their gigs.. oh wait
Sure, if you're referring to people who actually play instruments or sing. Electronic music shows are mostly DJing though.
I appreciate a platform for art to at least attempt at maintaining the semblance of it being for humans. If AI 'artists' disagree, they can boycott Tidal and not post their songs there. For me that is a feature that I actually really value, because AI slop making Spotify money has materially worsened my experience in that platform.
> Starting today, AI-generated music will not be monetizable.
AKA: We will take the value, if any, AI-generated music gives, but we will not be paying royalties. This is a contradictory statement. How does the AI-generated music give value if the generated content is inherently worthless?
That's the neat part: AI Slop "music" will have to stop pretending that it has any value.
I think my comment is being misunderstood. I don't think AI music has any value. I'm just calling out that Tidal's right and left hands are saying two different things. The left hand: AI music has no monetary value. The right hand: AI music is valuable enough to host on the platform. This is the schism that doesn't make sense to me.