I can’t see the labels relying on an honor system either. That will also be algorithmically determined to protect the monitization of their back-catalogue. I wonder what the trends are of traditional back-catalogue royalty payments vs training data licensing fees and when those curves cross?
I missed that. Do you have a link?
This is a different situation. Farian (notably Boney M) was the creative input, and session musicians, the artists.
But what is interesting is how the music industry responded to the underhand way the project was marketed. Their silence nowadays speaks volumes.
There are a lot of “howto” videos on YouTube now. The general advice seems to be that the income is in background play and forget playlists. Background/passive listening is about 20% of the total music market, but I don’t know if that proportion rises with streaming subscribers or how its distributed over genres. What’s going wrong I think is that background/active listening firewall is not working on streaming platforms. I am just as bothered by human elevator slop as AI elevator slop invading my active listening, maybe more so TBH. Human is not necessarily good music. The bar can be extraordinarily low. I switched off roon radio, for example, long before AI became an issue. I wonder what a crowd-sourced room AI playlist would look like?
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Nothing to do with the younger generations. Same could be said of my peers. All that’s changed is accessibility to music.
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Plus see my above nazi example.
Also consider that there are many uses for music. If you are jogging, a steady BPM beat without too many surprises may be a good thing, and they won’t care if AI
Musicians, as we maybe all know, are somewhat outside the box. In the past few years I have consulted with several musicians on how they avoid the whole AI explosion. Musicians when they perform, most of them, are very particular about what they record, perform, put their name on etc. Taking a chance that someone who artificially created a song isn’t someone they would generally trust. Besides, once ran past the lawyers, it would probly be a squashed deal.
That may be true of artists on major record labels that have a legal department within. But I would be surprised if the independent labels and those that self-release would go through the time, expense, and effort to seek legal advice.
As I read this post, and have replied, and then read replies, Im seeing a lot of what will Tidal do, or what will Roon do etc … As I said previously, I don’t think music companies, streaming, companies or tech companies are gong to do anything. If anything, they are going to use AI to their advantage. Use it to create content. Use it to study the trends of their customers and mold their business model accordingly.
The answer and to a certain extent responsibility (to yourselves mostly) is within each person to make choices and go about their listening habits that gives you the most enjoyment.
AI is here, although VERY young, and if there is a way a company can make money using it, they will. To think a company is going to get rid of AI is just setting up disappointment. These companies are counting on you thinking it’s about music, when their perspective is it’s about money. Which quite frankly as a person who owns several companies I have to tell you, I love what I do, but I certainly would not do it for free.
As an example, if you walk onto a car lot to purchase a certain car. You love the car, it has everything you want, but is only offered in a manual transmission. You either buy the car or you don’t. The car manufacturer isnt going to change the design of the car because your unhappy with a manual transmission. There is always someone next in line who loves a manual transmission that will buy the car.
No matter how much the listening public dislikes AI, if a streaming company can make money, get sponsored and have people to continue to listen to a playlist full of AI generated music, they will. Again, in my opinion, it’s going to be up to the listener to decide, not the company charging the subscription fee.
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Sometimes independent and smaller record labels work on paper thin budgets and if there is a chance that the money they could potentially make off investment in an artist could be compromised, they certainly would seek legal counsel.
Let’s just say for a minute, 100% of the music listening public dislikes AI generated music. You’re an artist whose entire album is made of AI generated music (if such an artist would ever exsist). I would think the label looking to back the artist is going to do some checking to see the viability of their return on investment being realistic.
Its 2026, no matter how small or big your business is, not have some sort of legal representation is business set up to fail a good amount of the time. In my opinion anyway. But thats an entirely different post. LOL
So, how would you verify if the artist/band song(s) presented to you is/are AI-free?
Okay, so this is a wicked problem. We’re not going to solve that.
So, the question is, what should Roon do about, if indeed they can, and what would we do if Roon begins to play AI slop?
My response is unambiguous. I’d cease using Qobuz or TIDAL. And, without a connected streaming account, Roon’s offering and advantage is greatly dimished.
Any legit label / investor is going to go through the do dilligents on copyright filing, who actually owns the rights to lyrics, musicsal composition etc. As a label why would you back an artists who is recording music, that down the road you could lose massive revenue from if it should become big. Again, the music industry is a business, they are more concerned about legalize, copyright, publishing than your thinking.
Ironically, the current best way to recognize something as AI is to run it through AI. Is that what we really want for Roon? It also raises the question if, say, somebody uses AI to clean up a tape glitch, for example, then does that render the entire piece as being considered AI? Lots to unpack here, and just like in the photography world, no good answers, or at least clean cut ones. For now, discerning musicphiles, such as those using Roon (for the most part I would like to think) just need to use their heads, and avoid things like dodgy, service created playlists, for one example. With streaming services, there’s more than enough easily identifiable authentic music which no one person could actually listen to in a lifetime. So just stick to those.
It’s more of an issue for younger generations in my mind. My thirteen year old daughter gets to play here Spotify in the car (I only subscribe for my children) and sometimes there’s tracks by artists, that while a perfectly good rendering of say a genre like Mazzy Star shoegaze or female singer/songwriter, just seem a bit off to me in regards to the artist name etc and I wonder to myself if it’s AI. But as long as she enjoys it, who am I to criticize? It’s the age we now live in, and it’s up to each and every one of us to navigate it in the way we see fit, for better or worse.
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I subscribe to both streaming services primarily as a discovery tool, using Roon Radio. I skip the tunes that do not sound relevant to the seed track/album. And when something intrigues me, I search the web to learn more about the artist. If I discover, as I did with Frost Livingston, that it’s likely AI, I avoid listening to anything else from their discography and block the artist.
It is rare that Roon Radio has presented me with a suspicious AI-generated track thus far. But the odds of that continuing seem slim if these streaming services are uploading 60,000 AI tracks per day to their catalogs, according to Deezer. So, I suspect Roon Radio will become less popular, and the streaming services will not be worth the investment over time.
There’s a shed load of AI-generated Blues, which is where this discussion started, so I don’t think it is.
I use streaming exclusively through Roon for discovery, and buy what I enjoy. What I don’t want to see is Roon presenting AI-generated releases under New releases for you, Your playlists, Performing the music of, currated playlists etc. And, I don’t want Roon Radio playing AI slop, either.
I don’t think the listening public is that aware or even cares if music is AI generated or not. Heck, they aren’t even aware or care that everything is being Autotuned! It seems only a niche group of music lovers, like those here, care about any of this.
Well, I can only speak for me, but if people didn’t care, my consulting business would not be flourishing with exactly the question of how to avoid AI in music, and helping assist companies, record labels, artists etc in developing routines and practices moving forward about adapting to the new music landscape and how to present it to their clients, listeners, subscribers etc … So there must be some people that care if Im busy consulting … 
There are different populations and if 80% of casual listeners don’t care, this leaves still a large population of 20% of casual listeners + probably most more serious listeners to let your consulting business flourish. And at the same time the 80% provide a huge source of possible income to be harvested with AI slop.
So yeah, we need to be careful with generalizations like „people don’t care“ / „nobody likes slop“, etc.
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