The Push to Ban Music AI

The RIAA is trying to set the stage for an AI music ban

A demand for a requirement to label AI music is being pushed by one of the most notoriously evil organizations in the world is nothing more than a first step in its campaign to ban it from distribution platforms:

The RIAA and IFPI are leading a music industry push to get AI-made tracks labeled across the world’s streaming services.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report the news on Friday (July 10), noting that the music orgs plan to work with services such as Spotify and Apple Music to attach the labels.

Also behind the plan are the Recording Academy, SAG-AFTRA, the Human Artistry Campaign, and the American Association of Independent Music, according to the report.

The RIAA-led group is putting forward two tags, drawing a line between fully AI-generated tracks and those only partly made with AI.

The first, “AI-generated,” would apply to a track built entirely by AI from a text prompt, or one where a machine produced the lead vocal or the main instrumental takes. The second, “AI-assisted,” would flag a track that is mostly the work of people but leans on AI in places.

Two AI label designs are shown in the WSJ story: a black tile displaying “AI” in white capitals for fully AI-generated music, and a white tile showing “ai” in lowercase for AI-assisted tracks.

The news comes one month after a widely-read op/ed from MBW founder Tim Ingham on the topic, titled ‘Label The Slop‘. In it, he argues that Spotify and Apple already run a prominent, standardized ‘Explicit Content’ marker right on the track itself and that “there’s no reason ‘AI Content’ couldn’t be similarly obvious.”

A Deezer/Ipsos study of 9,000 listeners found that 97% could not tell AI songs from human-made ones, yet 80% wanted fully AI tracks clearly labeled.

RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier told the WSJ that plenty of fans are happy to listen to AI music, as long as they can tell when a real person is involved. “But flexibility in the creative process also means that artists who want to use AI in the creative process should be able to do so,” Glazier said. “Transparency is just the best way to have it both ways.”

The tags would sit on a track much as the “explicit” marker does today, according to the report. For now, they would say nothing about AI used in a song’s composition or lyrics, or in its cover art and music videos.

When Charles Stross sought to create the most evil bureaucracy in the world for his excellent novel ACCELERANDO, he combined the Internal Revenue Service with the Record Industry Association of America. Which is why, upon further reflection, I oppose this demand.

I don’t have any problem whatsoever with divulging the fact that I use AI for many of the the various things I produce. I am a massive advocate of AI as a tool for music, for writing, for images, and for video. It not only allows me to realize my ideas much faster and to do things that were previously impossible, but also frees me from reliance upon other people. As an open champion of AI use, a verified Suno Rockstar, and soon, a designer of what we anticipate will be the best textual AI for fiction, I am quite happy to let people know how those various creations were produced.

However, the fact that the RIAA proposal omits AI used in a song’s composition or lyrics exposes the fact that the RIAA doesn’t actually care about transparency. The lyrics and the composition are the fundamental creative elements of a song; the actual performance, production, and recording are relatively trivial in comparison. So the RIAA’s real purpose is to try to ban AI-generated recordings because they threaten its business model.

Mark my words. If the labeling campaign is successful, it will be rapidly followed by attempts to ban it from the various distribution services. Which is why I suspect there will be a bifurcation of music distribution, with AI-friendly, AI-dominated services like Spotify serving as the mainstream platforms and boutique services of organic and/or pseudo-organic platforms where human musicians play mostly AI-composed, AI-written songs.

And speaking of AI music, here’s a rather interesting remix of a Byronic song from THE ONLY SKULL CD, of which about 20 copies remain available. I wanted to try blending country rock with nu metal in recreating ONCE THERE WAS SORROW and the results were surprisingly anthemic with a slight dash of gospel.