We, the undersigned members of the music community, demand that music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music label fully AI-generated songs and artists in the same way they label "explicit" songs.
Currently, fully AI artists are exploding across streaming services, accounting for 40% of daily song uploads. These artists are directly presented as real people, and many are created by companies, flooding streaming services at an industrial scale. This is a brazen escalation of the ongoing theft of human creativity by GenAI music companies. They built billion-dollar systems off our songs without permission or payment, and now, the products of these systems are siphoning royalties away from the very artists who trained them. Many human artists will not survive this financial erosion.
Fortunately, listeners do not want this to happen. No one appreciates the authenticity and human connection behind music better than listeners. They understand that while certain uses of AI tools can augment musicians' abilities, fully AI-generated music removes human creativity from the music-making process. And just like nutrition labels on food, listeners want to know what they're consuming.
As such, we demand that streaming services:
- Label fully AI-generated songs and artists, just like "explicit" songs
- Remove fully AI-generated songs from algorithmic recommendations
- Allow users to exclude fully AI-generated songs from their listening experience
We have not accepted the inevitability that AI will replace human art. And listeners haven't either. We admire Deezer for already labeling AI songs (though we urge them to make their labels more obvious). iHeartRadio and Bandcamp have removed AI songs entirely.
Inform your listeners, or they will leave you.
Sincerely,
Human musicians
