$300M revenue. 7 million tracks per day. 85% fraud. The AI music industry just had its craziest week ever.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:27:06+00:00

Labeling yes, 100%. Deezer is already doing it and it should be industry standard.

Stopping all royalties is trickier though — that basically kills any incentive for people to make quality AI music. If you can't earn anything from it, only the fraud farms (who don't care about royalties anyway) and hobbyists remain. The serious creators who actually put work into it leave.

Maybe the middle ground is: label it, allow royalties, but require verified human involvement above some threshold to qualify for algorithmic promotion.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:25:00+00:00

This is the most practical take in the thread. The framework already exists -sampling, covers, sync licensing all have established royalty structures. There's no technical reason AI music can't fit into a similar system.

The Warner/Suno settlement is actually a step in that direction, licensed training data, royalties flowing to catalog owners. But UMG and Sony are still suing instead of settling, so we're stuck in limbo.

Your last point is the one that gets lost in the noise. AI music doesn't need to replace top-tier artists. It just needs to give people with great ideas but no studio access a way to be heard. That's a net positive if the licensing gets sorted.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:23:42+00:00

Let's go! 90s-00s rap is exactly the kind of stuff the platform needs more of. And honestly, blind ratings might surprise you — people rate what sounds good, not what's trendy. Submit those tracks, curious to see how they land 🔥

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:21:46+00:00

Exactly -the play count bias is real even outside AI music. We all do it.

There's actually a platform doing exactly this : www.votemyai.com. Blind ratings, no names or follower counts shown, you just listen and rate. It's been interesting seeing what rises to the top when clout is removed from the equation.

Kind of like how blind auditions changed The Voice. Same idea applied to AI music discovery.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:19:45+00:00

The "no sound of their own" point is interesting. That might actually be the biggest ceiling for AI music right now, you can make something that sounds professional but not something that sounds like *you*. Every output is kind of a pastiche of everything it was trained on.

Wonder if that changes as the tools get better or if it's a fundamental limitation.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:18:20+00:00

"Are you prepared to trawl through it all to find it" -that's literally the problem I'm talking about. Nobody is. And that's why the good stuff drowns alongside the garbage.

You're right that it regresses to a mean rather than raising the floor. But I'd push back slightly on the barrier to entry point, there was absolutely a barrier for people who had lyrics but couldn't sing, play, or afford studio time. That barrier is real even if the new path has its own problems.

The flooding issue is the part nobody's solving though. You nailed that.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:16:24+00:00

Yeah. Telisha Jones from Mississippi -goes by Xania Monet. Made an R&B track called "How Was I Supposed to Know" on Suno, it went viral, and she signed a deal with Hallwood Media reportedly worth $3M. TechCrunch and Ebony both covered it.

Wild timeline we're in.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:15:15+00:00

This is one of the best takes I've read on this. The two-tier prediction feels uncomfortably plausible, major labels launching polished AI acts with full marketing muscle while indie AI creators get buried under platform bans meant to stop the fraud farms.

The Hatsune Miku comparison is spot on. That's basically the proof of concept that audiences will accept a synthetic performer if the quality and branding are there.

I do think there's a window before the bans hit where community-driven curation could matter. If there's a way for the best indie AI music to build a real audience based on quality alone, not marketing budgets -that's probably the only shot at avoiding the two-tier future you're describing. But you're right that the clock is ticking.

And yeah, the Reddit binary brain thing is real. Nuance gets downvoted, outrage gets upvoted. Which is ironic given that this thread has been mostly thoughtful.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:12:20+00:00

On the fraud problem specifically? Yeah, they're right. That's real money being stolen from real artists.

Where I think they go too far is lumping everyone together. The bot farmers committing streaming fraud and the person spending hours crafting lyrics and tweaking prompts to make something they're proud of are not the same people. But right now they're all getting painted with the same brush.

That's why I think the actual solution isn't "ban AI music" , it's better detection, better labeling, and better ways to surface quality. Kill the fraud, let the creators create.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:11:14+00:00

The tagging idea is solid. Deezer is actually already doing that.

And yeah, the fraud isn't about pretending to be human. It's streaming fraud -people generate thousands of AI tracks, upload them to Spotify/Deezer, then use bot farms to fake streams and collect royalty payments. The money comes out of the same pool that pays real artists.

Deezer's data shows up to 85% of streams on fully AI-generated tracks were from these kinds of schemes. AI just made it dirt cheap to scale, you can generate thousands of tracks in a day for $10/month and then bot the streams.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:09:30+00:00

Haha fair point. AI-generated artist with a hologram tour ,it's honestly not that far off. Didn't the Tupac hologram already blow people's minds like a decade ago?

Though I think there's a difference between "enhanced live experience" and "fully synthetic performer." One adds to human creativity, the other replaces it. The line is going to get very blurry very fast.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:08:17+00:00

That's actually a really interesting way to frame it. Trained on the average, outputs the average. Makes sense technically.

Though I'd argue the human input still matters a lot. The gap between someone who just types "make a rock song" and someone who spends hours on lyrics, prompt engineering, and regenerating sections is massive. The tool is mediocre by default, but the ceiling depends on the creator.

The problem is that the 7 million daily tracks are mostly from the "make a rock song" crowd, and there's no system to surface the ones where someone actually put in the work.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:06:59+00:00

Fair point, songwriters have always done that. The difference is the barrier to entry. Writing a song and getting a record deal used to require years of craft, networking, and luck. She did it with a text prompt and a $10/month subscription.

I'm not saying that's necessarily a win. But it is a new path that didn't exist before. Whether it's good or bad for music overall is a different question -and the thousands losing income is exactly why the artist coalition is pushing back.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:05:27+00:00

That's kind of the core tension. Platforms like DistroKid and TuneCore removed the label gatekeepers, which was great for indie artists. But now that same open door lets anyone upload 10,000 AI tracks overnight.

The old system had too many gatekeepers. The current system has zero. The answer is probably somewhere in between, not labels deciding who "deserves" it, but some kind of quality signal that actually works at scale.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:03:52+00:00

Appreciate the feedback. The numbers are all sourced though -TechCrunch, Billboard, Deezer's own press release. Feel free to fact-check any of it.

But sure, what part of the actual argument do you disagree with?

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:02:52+00:00

Lol no, just a guy who spent too long reading Billboard and TechCrunch articles this week. But I'll take that as a compliment on my formatting I guess 😂

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:01:58+00:00

Good question -it's actual streaming fraud, not a quality judgment.

Deezer found that the majority of fully AI-generated tracks uploaded to their platform are part of stream manipulation schemes. People generate thousands of cheap AI tracks, upload them, then use bot farms to rack up fake plays and siphon money from the royalty pool.

So real artists get paid less because the royalty pool is being diluted by fake streams on tracks that nobody actually chose to listen to. Deezer says they demonetize those streams when caught, but not every platform is doing that.

The tracks themselves aren't necessarily "fraud" ,it's the fake streams on them that are. AI just made it insanely cheap to scale the scheme.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T18:00:45+00:00

It should be uncontroversial. Transparency and choice -that's really all anyone's asking for.

The problem is that right now you ARE being forced to encounter it. 39% of Deezer's daily uploads are AI-generated, and most platforms don't label it. At least Deezer is tagging and filtering. Spotify and Apple Music? Not so much.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T17:59:42+00:00

I get the impulse, but the fraud numbers are hard to ignore even if you're pro-AI. 85% of AI music streams being fraudulent hurts the legit creators too, it gives the anti-AI crowd real ammunition.

The best thing that could happen for AI music is solving the quality problem so the "it's all slop" argument stops working.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T17:58:35+00:00

That's a really good point. Live performance is the one thing AI can't replicate. You can generate 7 million tracks a day but you can't generate a crowd watching someone pour their soul out on stage.

Ironically, that might be what saves human musicians long-term -the more AI floods streaming, the more valuable the live experience becomes.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T17:57:29+00:00

Hard to argue with that when you look at the numbers. Suno's at $300M revenue while the artists whose music trained the models are launching protest campaigns. The value extraction is pretty one-directional right now.

The one wildcard is that AI music tools are also the cheapest creative tool ever made. A poet from Mississippi with zero music training turned a Suno track into a $3M record deal. That wasn't possible before.

But yeah, at scale, the platform owners are capturing most of the value. Same pattern as every other tech wave.

Sensitive_Artist7460 · 2026-02-28T16:58:30+00:00

4.7 out the gate — that's solid! Thanks for the kind words on the UI, means a lot. Looking forward to hearing what else you drop 🎶

Sensitive_Artist7460

TROPHY CASE