The Trouble With Labeling AI Music: Why a Proposal to Add ‘AI’ Tags Is Missing the Point (Guest Column)
Categoria: Musica
A broad coalition of music organizations wants to label “AI-generated” and “AI-assisted” music on streaming services, but their approach is short-sighted.
Por Billboard | 16/07/2026
In the fall of 2012, Taylor Swift released Red . Her ambitions had outgrown Nashville, and so began a delicate dance: moving toward pop without rejecting the country audience that made her famous. She went for it with her third single on that record, “I Knew You Were Trouble.” Co-written with Max Martin and Shellback , it is not a country song: Its chorus crashes into a distorted synth bass drop from Native Instruments’ “Massive” software synthesizer with programmed drums; the vocals run through distortion, compression, pitch correction, reverb and delay. In fact, the song shared a lot of DNA with Martin’s precision-engineered boy-band-pop, and fans ate it up: “I Knew” hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Related RIAA, IFPI & More Come Together to Create System for Tagging AI-Generated Songs DJ Quik Says His Son 'Made a Mistake' Following Murder Conviction, Pleads With Fans to Stop Asking About It Naoshi Fujikura of Universal Music Japan on Japan's Unique Superfan Culture & Global Ambitions: Billboard Global Power Players Interview And how did the music community react to the technology that took Swift from the Bluebird Cafe to Nissan Stadium? Nobody cared. No synthesizer backlash. No campaign to warn listeners that her voice had been processed. No demand that the song be labeled “electronically assisted music.” Three decades earlier, the reaction was very different. In May 1982, the Central London branch of the UK Musicians’ Union passed a motion to ban synthesizers and drum machines, fearing machines would take work from working musicians (sound familiar?). American unions later fought the “virtual orchestras” threatening Broadway pit musicians. The technology since then has changed; the anxiety hasn’t. What happens when a machine can do work that once belonged to a person? Recently, an unusually broad coalition — the RIAA, IFPI, A2IM, WIN, IMPALA, the Recording Academy, SAG-AFTRA and the Human Artistry Campaign — proposed that streaming services label recordings “AI-generated” or “AI-assisted.” I understand why labels, artists and fans might support this. But the issue is far smaller than it seems. At best, the proposal is pointless. At worst, shortsighted. Here’s why: 1. Almost nobody is listening to this music. Streaming services now hold more than 253 million tracks, according to Luminate. Nearly half received ten streams or fewer in 2025; 88% got no more than 1,000. This is an unfathomable amount of music nobody hears: AI tracks, amateur uploads, meditation audio, karaoke, abandoned demos. Uploading a file is not building an audience. Most Gen AI tracks will land in the same graveyard as most human ones: available everywhere, heard by almost no one. Related A Short History of AI-Generated Music: From ‘Fake Drake’ to Blockbuster Legal Settlements 2. “AI-assisted” is almost impossible to define. Does AI