The music industry is yet again seeing a new format of music creation and consumption. Generative AI now creates and manipulates music faster than the legal frameworks currently in place to contain it. With powerful generative AI models, the debate is shifting toward how best to credit and compensate the creators within this new format shift and how new and existing infrastructure and technologies can be leveraged.
Will Hughes, VP of Account Management & Customer Success at Audible Magic—a company that identifies billions of media pieces monthly—sees this moment as the "nascent stage," a period brimming with both promise and peril. The industry stands at a crossroads: some tools to manage AI-generated music are here, but the blueprints for ethical use, and broad partnerships are still being drawn. "Ethical generative music is a possibility, with collaboration and partnership" Hughes says, striking a cautiously optimistic tone.
Early Days: "We're very much in the nascent stage of being able to widely license for AI-use cases, but it's all possible". Still, scale of content creation could be a stumbling block. "The identification of AI generated content at scale is possible today with our existing digital fingerprinting infrastructure," he explains. "The issue at hand is how this content will be consumed and monetized across platforms and the supply chain."
Plugin vs. Generative : Hughes identifies the two clear AI pathways "artist assistive" AI—long part of music production—and the newer, fully generative kind that raises messier questions. "Music producers and artists have been using AI for years in various ways in so far as plugins or sound modeling," he says. But while assistive tools are now standard, generative AI is triggering a different level of scrutiny, especially around explainability, ownership and rights.
Licensing, Ethics and Attribution: Licensing is widely understood to be the clearest path for rights holders to monetize generative AI. "I'm in favor of licensing new ways for music rights owners to monetize their works," says Hughes. Both generative and Artist-assistive tools, he believes, are promising use cases worth pursuing. "And eventually the music industry will get to a place where licensing for those use cases and attribution is possible." The industry seems to agree—major platforms like YouTube are already exploring licensing models for their AI tools. But getting there takes time and space for rights owners to understand how AI will affect their artists. "They work for the artists," emphasizes Hughes.
AI Policing and Audits: Attribution remains one of the hardest challenges, according to Hughes. "There are lots of discussions at play on how the industry can work with generative music after the point of creation," he explains. As licensing talks heat up, so does the demand for trustworthy attribution tech. But there’s broad skepticism about letting AI companies’ police themselves; many in the industry are calling for third-party, auditable systems. For Hughes, the path forward hinges on collaboration: "Attribution becomes possible through cooperation: clear licensing models, a shared understanding of how they work, and effective use of available and new technology."
The Evolution of UGC: Hughes sees "a pathway to licensing" for AI training data, likening its future to the evolution of user-generated content and streaming. "The business model around subscriptions and ad supported streaming is mature. I think we will get to a point where that is the case with licensing these new and interesting use cases, whether that's AI, music mashups, remixes or any other new innovative way for music rightsholders and artists to benefit from." He says.
Audible Magic is positioned to help shape that future, while staying realistic that "there is no one size fits all approach to digital rights management." For the last 25 years, we’ve seen major technological shifts in the music industry whether it’s P2P, Streaming, UGC. AI is the next shift. We focus on building scalable and reliable enterprise solutions as well as a hands-on customer success approach to enable partnerships within the overall music ecosystem.”