> 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.
It waxes and it wanes, but people breathlessly asking Grok "IS THIS TRUE??" is prevalent. People often call on Grok to argue their points for them. The interaction is inflicted.
I'm not sure if you actually haven't checked it since, but will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Accounts pushing white supremacy, the reversion of women's rights, hatred towards other on the basis of their race or religion, climate change denial, denial of science and promotion of pseudoscience, etc etc. are heavily promoted across the platform and get millions of engagements.
If you create a new account, the majority of the accounts you are shown and suggested to follow will be those pushing the above.
They've switched to a model of paying their users for engagement, which naturally encourages users to post the most engagement bait they can, which tends to be inflammatory and utterly lacking in depth or nuance.
It's actually gotten better for those of us that value all sides of a given story so we can come to our own conclusions, instead of parroting stuff we hear in bubbles. I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
X pays you for engagement if you have the premium subscription. Anyone with a verification symbol will be earning money from significant engagement, hence the rise of engagement bait on the platform.
How do you know / ensure you're getting all sides of the story? For one, many people have left the platform already because of its owner and policies, so you're not hearing those sides anymore.
> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
Anecdotal; people get paid / pay to post and promote certain content. But that's nothing new on social media.
That said, escaping or avoiding bubbles is good, just be sure you're actually out.
Do you think it will be a net social benefit for people to be taught 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5 with equal weight, and let them come to their own conclusions?
How about if the person who owns the educational institution puts their thumb on the 2 + 2 = 5 side of the balance for their own ends?
Assuming you already pay for 'verification' on X, you just need to get more followers/impressions and then you'll start being paid based on your impressions. If you know/follow anyone with the 'verified' checkmark who has a lot of followers, they'll be getting paid for impressions.
> It's actually gotten better for those of us that value all sides of a given story so we can come to our own conclusions, instead of parroting stuff we hear in bubbles.
1. A different bubble is still a bubble.
2. Regardless of political leanings, paying for engagement is a really bad sign.
> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
So? You don't have to know anyone being paid for it to be happening. The people who are really motivated by that are often poor by western standards and living on the other side of the world from you.
Facebook also pays for engagement, and what that's lead to is stuff like AI-generated shrimp Jesus and fake "I made this" memes, created by guys in India that don't even know English and don't own a computer. They throw crap at the wall from their cell phones to see what sticks, then do more of that.
IIRC the same thing happens for politics. Just the other day I read that a lot of popular "Alberta separatist" accounts are run by people who don't even live in Canada. They just use AI and shamelessly copy posts made by other accounts.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 also absurd, because the more streams they do, the more money they get, and the more their audience is engaged.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
---
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.
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
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.
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.
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" 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
> 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.
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.
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...)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think this is also a reason why X has gotten worse. They pay people for engagement.
How exactly can you even make Twitter worse than what it already was in 2022?
Mechahitler sure isn't helping.
I haven’t been on Twitter since before Elon took over. Do most users ever interact with Grok?
It waxes and it wanes, but people breathlessly asking Grok "IS THIS TRUE??" is prevalent. People often call on Grok to argue their points for them. The interaction is inflicted.
@slop put Twitter in SS bikini.
I'm not sure if you actually haven't checked it since, but will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Accounts pushing white supremacy, the reversion of women's rights, hatred towards other on the basis of their race or religion, climate change denial, denial of science and promotion of pseudoscience, etc etc. are heavily promoted across the platform and get millions of engagements.
If you create a new account, the majority of the accounts you are shown and suggested to follow will be those pushing the above.
They've switched to a model of paying their users for engagement, which naturally encourages users to post the most engagement bait they can, which tends to be inflammatory and utterly lacking in depth or nuance.
So much the same as Facebook?
Interesting. Kinda sounds like they should be paying for lack of engagement.
Provide financial incentives to make it worse.
> X has gotten worse
It's actually gotten better for those of us that value all sides of a given story so we can come to our own conclusions, instead of parroting stuff we hear in bubbles. I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
X pays you for engagement if you have the premium subscription. Anyone with a verification symbol will be earning money from significant engagement, hence the rise of engagement bait on the platform.
How do you know / ensure you're getting all sides of the story? For one, many people have left the platform already because of its owner and policies, so you're not hearing those sides anymore.
> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
Anecdotal; people get paid / pay to post and promote certain content. But that's nothing new on social media.
That said, escaping or avoiding bubbles is good, just be sure you're actually out.
Do you think it will be a net social benefit for people to be taught 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 + 2 = 5 with equal weight, and let them come to their own conclusions?
How about if the person who owns the educational institution puts their thumb on the 2 + 2 = 5 side of the balance for their own ends?
You get both the white nationalist and the antisemite sides, yes.
as opposed to ye olde twitter where only wholesome racism was allowed
https://web.archive.org/web/20181130015402/https://pasteboar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180827011518/https://pasteboar...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180827011519/https://pasteboar...
Well they defined racism as "you can only be racist if you have power" and they defined having power as being white, so this is totally kosher.
Assuming you already pay for 'verification' on X, you just need to get more followers/impressions and then you'll start being paid based on your impressions. If you know/follow anyone with the 'verified' checkmark who has a lot of followers, they'll be getting paid for impressions.
> It's actually gotten better for those of us that value all sides of a given story so we can come to our own conclusions, instead of parroting stuff we hear in bubbles.
1. A different bubble is still a bubble.
2. Regardless of political leanings, paying for engagement is a really bad sign.
> I don't know anyone that's paid to engage, including myself.
So? You don't have to know anyone being paid for it to be happening. The people who are really motivated by that are often poor by western standards and living on the other side of the world from you.
Facebook also pays for engagement, and what that's lead to is stuff like AI-generated shrimp Jesus and fake "I made this" memes, created by guys in India that don't even know English and don't own a computer. They throw crap at the wall from their cell phones to see what sticks, then do more of that.
IIRC the same thing happens for politics. Just the other day I read that a lot of popular "Alberta separatist" accounts are run by people who don't even live in Canada. They just use AI and shamelessly copy posts made by other accounts.
Paid to engage is a reference to the creator revenue sharing that encourages mass-appeal and ragebait content.
X is not a meritocracy of ideas, either.
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.
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.
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 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.
So why not just disallow it entirely, if that’s the goal?
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 ?
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 ;)
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.
Indeed. When they say that AI music can’t be monetized, they of course mean “… except by us”.
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.
Isn’t it true that AI generated music holds no legal copyright?
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.
Nothing is “created 100% by AI” though, because AIs don’t create things without human instructions.
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"?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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/
> 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.
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 also absurd, because the more streams they do, the more money they get, and the more their audience is engaged.
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.
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.
> Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically
Don't give ticketmaster any ideas.
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.
Baudelaire and many others said the same thing about photography.
You’re gonna have to be more specific. They said what same thing?
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
This is the key point, they're all enforcing tagging with no means to filter it out entirely.
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...
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.
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.
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" 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
Let's go with impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Headline should read "Tidal will not pay royalties to AI music"
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.
This is so surprising coming from Tidal - their entire business was built on high-fidelity, crediting artists, and paying them more
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?
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?
Tidal has declared that AI music will now be more profitable to them .
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.
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.
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...)
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.
Interesting discussion with Jeff Bridges on Suno: https://x.com/adityarao310/status/2071488913630204209/video/...
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.
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.
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.
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?
A very reasonable policy, prevents AI Slop from flooding the platform due to misaligned creator / consumer incentives
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.
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
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.
It won't be monetized until they create a new monetization policy where they get a greater revenue share from it.
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?
Why would someone doing that voluntarily tag their content as AI? they can make money by hiding it.
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.
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.)
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.
Then support your favorite AI music creators by going to their gigs.. oh wait
> 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.