Artificial intelligence is stepping into the music industry as artists, producers and songwriters fight to keep the human soul on the airwaves.
According to Deezer, a music streaming app, AI-generated music accounts for about 44% of daily music downloads. Last year, after riding the momentum of two popular songs called “Walk My Walk” and “Livin’ On Borrowed Time,” the AI-generated band Breaking Rust debuted at number nine on the Emerging Artists chart.
Unlike a real band, Nashville-based country music artist Ben Gallaher said fake AI bands cannot compete with live entertainment.
“I’m a live guy, so you can’t take an AI band and go see the show because there is no in-person band,” Gallaher said.
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Gallaher has been playing the guitar since he was six years old. He said there’s nothing AI can do to take all those years of experience away.
“AI can’t replace the human heart,” Gallaher said. “Nashville’s a special place. There’s no place like it in the world musically, and it’s always been that way. AI is not taking that away.”
Writing music with AI is a slippery slope, but using it to streamline business operations and hammer down a tour schedule is something Gallaher supports.
“If AI writes a line, you can’t then use that line and say you wrote it,” Gallaher said. “We can use AI to help find certain venues based on the demographics of where people are listening to the music. That’s an amazing tool.”
The recording studio is one of the places where AI is used to refine workflow in the early stages of song creation.
Ocean Way Nashville Director of Operations, Joe Baldridge, said using AI is like having another collaborator in the room to bounce ideas off of.
“They’re going to want to use it to create an edge in their workflow,” Baldridge said. “You could use it as a collaborator. You could use it as an editor.”
Although AI can be used to lay down basic ideas in the song-creating process, Baldridge said nothing can replace the authenticity of human-created music.
He said most people can detect when something is made by a computer.
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“We’ve had drum machines for a long time. We’ve had ways to manipulate vocals for a long time. We’ve had ways to grab incredible sounds from many different things and program them together to mock up a track,” Baldridge said. “Humanity and that representation of authenticity and art is going to be something that audiences will seek out.”
There are no federal laws to protect human artists from AI-generated music topping the charts.
Artists like Grimes, David Guetta, Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine, Lauv, Kanye “Ye” West and Tyga have shown support for AI in music.
However, the list of artists that openly oppose it is much longer. In 2024, over 200 artists joined the “Artist Rights Alliance” in signing a letter against the use of AI in music.
Lee Miller, board president of the Nashville Songwriters Association International, said more needs to be done to protect songwriters from AI programs that copy human art.
“Every song comes from a lifetime of experience,” Miller said. “You will absolutely destroy the art if you take away the human experience.”
When someone prompts AI to write a song, Miller said the robot analyzes and copies the style and words of a real songwriter, adding that it “muddies the waters” of what is art and what is a “spreadsheet.”
“Is that what the public wants? Do you want to live in a society where everything is just generated by the robot?” Miller said. “I feel like, at the very least, the lawmakers are going to have to step in and put guardrails on what is copyrightable and what isn’t, what’s protected and what isn’t.”
Entertainment attorney Barry Shrum said the United States’ copyright law is “human centric.” The U.S. Copyright Office does not grant copyright protection to anything that is created solely by artificial intelligence.
“Our copyright law was developed and foreseen as something that would incentivize humans to create things so that we can benefit society and grow our culture,” Shrum said.
In July, the Recording Industry Association of America and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry started preposing guidelines to protect human creators.
“They want the streaming platforms to identify AI-generated and AI-assisted [music],” Shrum said.
In August, Apple Music announced that it would start labeling AI music by the end of 2026.
Spotify allows AI-generated songs on its platform. However, the streaming service announced a new policy which will label artists’ profiles with an “AI Persona” badge.
SoundCloud also allows AI-generated songs on its platform. Unlike Apple Music and Spotify, SoundCloud currently discloses if music is AI generated. However, it prohibits third parties from using artists’ content to train generative AI models to mimic creators.
