Electronic music veteran Gareth Emery has announced the launch of Emotional Intelligence Records, an AI-free imprint built on the conviction that streaming platforms and bad actors are nefariously building a business model out of artists’ stolen life’s work.Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 Emery, a renowned producer of trance and progressive house music, says the record label grew out of a creeping discomfort with AI’s increasingly harmful impact on human artists.
Initially impressed by AI’s utility for administrative and productivity tasks, his perspective shifted when he encountered music apparently generated using his work as training data without consent, a controversial practice that sits in deeply contested legal and ethical territory across the creative industries right now.An estimated $4.6 billion in annual artist revenue could be lost to AI-generated music by 2028, according to a recent economic study conducted by CISAC and PMP Strategy with participation from Deezer, who said AI “represents a colossal, even critical, challenge for the music creation sector as a whole.” Emery’s announcement of Emotional Intelligence Records framed the label as a cultural intervention aimed squarely at what he sees as a systemic failure.
He describes a streaming economy populated by “fake artists” where the key players “seem happy to bury human music under infinite synthetic slop.” The DJ reserved particular venom for the platforms themselves, accusing them of acquiring “infinite content for almost nothing, while driving down the value of human work in the name of shareholder value.” Suno, the controversial AI music platform that allows users to create songs with simple text prompts, recently raised over $400 million and raised its valuation to $5.4 billion despite a thicket of contentious copyright lawsuits.The company’s co-founder and CEO, Mikey Shulman, faced pervas...