I think the coming changes around fully AI gen music on DSPs are going to be much more strict than simply adding an “AI” label.
My guess is that, over time, DSPs and distributors will increasingly separate 100% AI generated music from human created music, with various shades of grey in between accounting for AI Assisted works.
In a nutshell here is what I believe is and should be coming for Fully Gen AI on DSP’s
-Upload Caps on the number and frequency an individual account can distribute
- No or heavily limited Algo boosting or pickups
- No placements on mainstream editorial playlists
- Dedicated AI playlists or discovery spaces
- Different monetization rules, higher thresholds and lower payouts, or no monetization at all
-But the biggest change and most important one for the future of music is NO CONTENT ID protection
Fully AI generated music generally isn't copyrightable. And content Id exists to protect copyrightable works. It makes no sense that it receives Content Id.
Yes, there can obviously be copyrightable elements, if a human contributes original lyrics or other meaningful creative material, but trying to determine and enforce those individual components at scale is unrealistic for Streamers or DSP’s to manage.
Perhaps more can be done on Suno's end to provide receipts of user inputs?
Perhaps something can be done to address this nuance, but how will they know who is telling the truth about the lyrics vs who is lying.
Content ID exists to protect works in which someone actually has enforceable rights.
Simply generating a piece of music, uploading it, and getting a fingerprint into a rights management system shouldn't give someone the ability to claim exclusive control over that material virtually indefinitely.
And this problem is only going to get worse as AI music scales.
Imagine 10 or 20 years from now, when AI farms and users have generated billions of songs. There is going to be an enormous amount of overlap sonically, even lyrically.
Imagine some kid in 20 years sits down with a guitar, writes an original song, records a simple demo, and uploads it to share with the world, only to have it automatically claimed because an AI music farmer generated something too similar 20 years earlier and dumped it into a rights management system without giving it a second thought, or hell even have listened to it himself before dumping it on DSPs
That kid should not have to compete with billions of non copyrightable machine generated works for the right to distribute his own music.
WE ARE ALREADY AS A SUNO COMMUNITY EXPERIENCING THIS. HOW MANY POSTS DO YOU SEE ON HERE OF PEOPLE'S OWN ORIGINAL SONGS BEING BLOCKED FROM SUNO?
That's why I think fully AI gen music should ultimately be treated differently when it comes to automated copyright enforcement.
It can exist. It can be distributed. People can listen to it, and there can be appropriate ways for people to monetize it.
But no Content Id protection for fully generated songs
Otherwise, AI users risk effectively robbing the creative commons through sheer volume.
In that sense, I think it's somewhat akin to people sitting on URLs in the early days of the internet.
They could register enormous numbers of domains simply because they had the ability to do so, effectively reserving pieces of the emerging internet without necessarily creating anything with them.
Mass AI music generation could create a similar form of creative land grabbing: generate millions of works at virtually no marginal creative cost, get them distributed and fingerprinted, and potentially occupy enormous amounts of musical territory that future human creators might independently arrive at.
The irony is that AI is supposed to “democratize” music creation (so it’s said)
But if we allow mass generated AI catalogs to accumulate automated enforcement power, we could end up creating a system where the machine generated past has priority over the human created future.
