Applause is wonderful.
Recognition matters. Encouragement matters. We all appreciate seeing initiatives that appear to move our industry in the right direction.
But what happens when the applause itself becomes the incentive?
A recent example that generated a lot of applause is TIDAL’s decision to label what it considers AI generated music and exclude it from royalty payments. This feels reasonable. If content is automatically generated at industrial scale without meaningful human creativity, many would agree that it should not simply dilute the value created by human artists.
So far, so good.
The more interesting question is not whether this decision is right today, but what it may enable tomorrow.
History tells us that platforms rarely stop at the first argument. Once a distinction has been accepted, it often becomes the foundation for the next one.
We’ve seen this before.
In television licensing, new competitors were initially welcomed as a way to promote diversity and broaden the market. In Sweden, broadcasters argued that services such as Epidemic Sound increased competition and offered new opportunities for creators. Before long, however, that same development became part of the financial argument in licence negotiations, suggesting that traditional collective licensing should be worth less because some music was now sourced elsewhere.
Internationally, collecting societies such as STIM, PRS and GEMA have similarly faced arguments that parts of platform consumption somehow fall outside the value they represent.
The reasoning evolves.
Today, AI music may simply be excluded from remuneration.
Tomorrow, AI music will almost certainly split into two categories.
One category will consist of vast quantities of automatically generated content that attracts little or no audience.
The other will consist of AI generated works that attract millions of listeners, generate substantial commercial value and become strategically important to platforms.
Those works will inevitably command commercial value and demand commercial recognition. Alongside today’s largest human made catalogues, they are likely to move increasingly towards direct licensing and premium commercial deals.
When that future arrives, we should already be using the technologies that make it fair. Not only to identify AI generated works, but also to ensure transparency, establish provenance and enable fair remuneration for everyone who contributes to the creation of that value.
Meanwhile, the remaining vast pool of creators may once again find themselves sharing a smaller collective pie.
Ironically, those celebrating the first step the loudest may eventually discover that the long term consequences affect them most.
This is not a prediction of doom.
Quite the opposite.
I have never been more optimistic about the technology itself.
We already have the technical capability to move beyond assumptions and towards facts. We can move beyond the outdated pro rata model, where remuneration is largely detached from the actual use of each individual work and instead redistributed from a collective pool that inevitably favours the biggest repertoires. We also have provenance technologies that can establish authorship, timestamp creation and create trustworthy records of creative works from the very beginning.
Solutions such as ProofProfile, developed by New Internet Media, demonstrate that protecting originality no longer has to rely solely on trust. If someone copies your work later, they may imitate it. They can never become the first verified creator.
The same technological shift is also transforming music licensing. As streaming alone becomes increasingly difficult as a sustainable income source for many creators, sync licensing is becoming an essential revenue stream rather than a secondary one.
Here too, technology is opening new possibilities. Platforms such as servo.music are making professional sync licensing accessible beyond the largest catalogues, allowing every song, not only those backed by major players, to compete on its own merits while creators retain control over licensing terms.
The sync market is also likely to be among the most cautious when it comes to AI generated music. Film studios, broadcasters, advertising agencies and brands cannot afford uncertainty around ownership or provenance. As technology increasingly makes it possible to verify where creative works originate and whether copyrighted material has contributed to their creation, transparency will become a competitive advantage. That is one reason why platforms such as servo.music continue to focus on promoting human created music with clear rights and trusted provenance.
Perhaps that is where our applause should be directed.
Not towards intentions.
But towards solutions that genuinely strengthen creators’ positions.
Because when we applaud real results rather than symbolic gestures, innovation accelerates and the entire creative ecosystem benefits.
I’ll applaud that.
#AI #MusicIndustry #Copyright