{"id":191206,"date":"2025-10-01T09:18:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T13:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2025\/10\/01\/ai-artists-are-here-is-it-ethical-to-sign-them-to-record-deals-4\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T09:18:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T13:18:06","slug":"ai-artists-are-here-is-it-ethical-to-sign-them-to-record-deals-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/2025\/10\/01\/ai-artists-are-here-is-it-ethical-to-sign-them-to-record-deals-4\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Artists Are Here. Is It Ethical to Sign Them to Record\u00a0Deals?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tNeedless to say, the revelation<\/a> that singer Xania Monet is an AI creation that prompted a label bidding war and a multimillion-dollar advance is not Kehlani<\/a>\u2018s favorite music-business development. \u201cNothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me,\u201d the R&B star declared on TikTok<\/a> last week. \u201cEspecially not AI in the creative arts, in which people have worked hard for, trained for, slept on the floor for, f\u2013king got injuries for, worked for their entire lives. I\u2019m sorry, I don\u2019t respect it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMonet\u2019s success \u2014 her five songs have racked up 17 million U.S. streams and generated an estimated $52,000<\/a> over two months \u2014 has led to ethical conflicts in the business. Some reps from indie labels who spoke with Billboard<\/em> say they would never sign an AI artist because they\u2019re committed to human creators. Like Kehlani, they resent the idea that a poet in her bedroom pushing a few buttons can compete with human artists. But others in the business say Xania Monets are acceptable if the music companies behind them behave responsibly, respect international copyright law and follow the policies of streaming services like Spotify (which recently updated its policies<\/a> to avoid \u201cAI slop\u201d and removed 75 million \u201cspammy tracks\u201d) and Deezer (which announced in June<\/a> that it would flag AI-generated content with a prominent message to users).<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAI Artist Xania Monet Has Racked Up Millions of Streams. How Much Money Is That\u00a0Worth?\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tSylvan Esso Is Pulling Its Catalog From Spotify\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\t\u201cIt just depends. If you cook a meal for somebody, but you\u2019re doing so with stolen food, that\u2019s different from going to the supermarket, buying food and cooking the meal,\u201d says Meng Ru Kuok<\/strong>, founder and CEO of Caldecott Music Group, which operates BandLab Technologies, a music-creation service that enables AI tools. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to punish people for doing things the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMonet is the creation of 31\u2013year-old poet Telisha Jones from Olive Branch, Miss., whose manager says she writes her own lyrics but uses Suno, an AI music service, for other elements of her tracks. That is concerning for major labels, which sued Suno<\/a> and another AI-music firm, Udio, in June 2024, alleging copyright infringement on what they called \u201can almost unimaginable scale.\u201d (A rep for the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the three majors and led the lawsuits, declined to comment.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s an ethical component here,\u201d says Ryan Schmidt<\/strong>, a Savannah, Ga.-based music lawyer. \u201cIf you created your label because you want to promote young, up-and-coming talent, and you want to advance music, then AI art might not be it for you. If you are a label who wants to be in business to have the biggest catalog possible, and maximize earnings, AI\u2019s certainly one avenue to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Thursday (Sept. 25), Spotify attempted to draw ethical boundaries<\/a> by beefing up protections against what it calls \u201cbad actors\u201d that flood the music streaming service with often AI-enhanced tracks that \u201cdilute the royalty pool,\u201d according to a Spotify announcement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAn AI Artist Signed A Multimillion Dollar Record Deal. What Does That\u00a0Mean?\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3><\/div>\n

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\n\tSpotify\u2019s royalty payout formula takes the total number of streams on the service per month and divides that by the market share of individual rightsholders on the platform. So if so-called \u201cAI slop\u201d artificially boosts the overall track number, or accrues a significant stream count, the proportion paid to each rightsholder shrinks. According to Spotify, overall payouts to music rightsholders increased from $1 billion in 2014 to $10 billion last year.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the case of Monet, according to Alex Bestall<\/strong>, founder of production-music company Rightsify, it\u2019s unclear how much of her creation involved AI systems and how much was human input from Jones. Under U.S. copyright law, music created solely by machines cannot be copyrighted. \u201cIf you just say, \u2018Make me a pop song,\u2019 that\u2019s generic,\u201d Bestall says. \u201cBut if you gave it the exact chord progressions, the structure and add in your own human vocal, then yes, that should probably be copyright protected.\u201d Regarding Monet \u2014 and AI artists in general \u2014 disclosure of what came from robots and what came from humans, he adds, is \u201cthe great first step.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn their Suno and Udio lawsuits, the major labels criticized the tech companies for \u201cunlawfully\u201d copying labels\u2019 recordings to \u201ctrain their AI models to generate music that could saturate the market with machine-generated content.\u201d Still, one major label made an offer to sign Monet, even though her creator used Suno \u2014 which would have meant the label was profiting off the use of Suno, potentially undermining its lawsuit against the company. In the end, the winning label was the indie Hallwood Media, led by Neil Jacobson<\/strong>, a former executive with Universal Music Group-owned Interscope Records.<\/p>\n

\n\tTerry McBride<\/strong>, co-founder and longtime CEO of Nettwerk Music Group, the Canadian indie label that broke Sarah McLachlan<\/a>, Paris Paloma<\/a> and many others, says he would never have considered entering such a bidding war. Regarding Monet, he says, \u201cI believe the author is writing the lyrics and the AI is taking that and putting an AI voice and music to it \u2014 that\u2019s not going to be a touring entity as we know it,\u201d he says. \u201cWe would not sign that. Even if it did hundreds of millions of streams, we have no interest in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBen Swanson<\/strong>, COO of Secretly Group, the Indianapolis indie label home of Mitski<\/a>, Phoebe Bridgers<\/a>, Angel Olsen<\/a> and others, has a more nuanced position on Monet. He acknowledges AI is a revolutionary tool for music-making, comparing it to the way ProTools, synthesizers and drum machines once changed music. But he advocates for a compensation system when AI trains its source material on copyrighted music created by others.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere will be some AI artists that become culturally significant \u2014 and maybe even financially significant \u2014 but I think those will be the outliers,\u201d says Swanson, adding that he has never been involved in \u201cany sort of negotiation\u201d with an AI artist. Does he fear competition from labels that sign AI artists, because they could potentially dilute the royalty pool for Secretly Group \u2014 or simply compete for exposure with his label\u2019s artists on streaming services, radio stations and so on? \u201cIf the majors want to get into a bidding war and spend $3 million on an AI artist,\u201d he responds, \u201chave at it.\u201d<\/p>\n


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Aller \u00e0 la source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Needless to say, the revelation that singer Xania Monet is an AI creation that prompted a label bidding war and a multimillion-dollar advance is not Kehlani\u2018s favorite music-business development. \u201cNothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me,\u201d the R&B star declared on TikTok last week. \u201cEspecially not AI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musique","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyberlego.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}