The recorded music industry is done waiting for regulators to sort out the AI transparency problem on its own.Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 A coalition that includes the Recording Industry Association of America and the Grammys has announced a unified labeling system designed to tell listeners, at a glance, how much of a song was made using artificial intelligence.
Under the hood, the labels will run on metadata attached to tracks as they move through delivery systems to streaming services, distributors and aggregators.The system boils down to two tags: “AI-Generated” and “AI-Assisted.” A track gets the “AI-Generated” label when generative AI produced most or all of its creative content.
Think an AI-generated lead vocal, an AI-performed instrumental part or a track built entirely from a text prompt.The “AI-Assisted” label is for songs where humans handled the lead vocal and main instruments but leaned on AI tools for supporting elements.
There are real limits, however, to what this covers, at least for now.The labels apply only to sound recordings.
Lyrics, composition, music videos and cover art aren’t included in this first version of the system, which means a song could carry an “AI-Assisted” tag on its audio while an AI-written lyric or an AI-generated album cover goes completely unlabeled.The announcement cites data from Deezer showing that AI tracks comprised nearly half of new music uploaded to the platform as of April.
Apple Music has reported a similar trend, saying more than a third of the tracks submitted to its service are fully AI-generated.Those numbers help explain why an unusually broad set of industry players, who don’t always agree on much, came together to back a shared standard rather than let individual platforms invent their own rules.
Other organizations backing the initiative include FPI, A2IM, WIN, IMPALA, SAG-AFTRA and the Human Art...