AI Is Coming for the Music Industry. How Will Artists Adapt?

Almost a decade before San Francisco’s streets were dotted with billboards urging business owners to “Stop Hiring Humans,” Dr. Maya Ackerman began working in generative AI — at the time, a niche field of about 100 academic researchers.

A lifelong pianist and singer, she founded one of Silicon Valley’s first generative AI startups, WaveAI, in 2017. One of its products, LyricStudio, offers a sounding board for songwriters, with brainstorming prompts and rhyme suggestions. But ever since generative AI exploded in 2022, Ackerman has noticed a trend: Investors tend to fund companies whose tech increasingly cuts humans out of the creative process altogether.

In her new book, Creative Machines: AI, Art & Us, Ackerman calls for a paradigm shift in the industry. “We’re fighting against this greedy, capitalistic morality that’s really broken,” she says in a recent video call.

When it comes to music AI companies, two of the most dominant are Udio and Suno (valued at an estimated $500 million each), which allow users to generate complete songs using nothing but text prompts. AI comes up with a composition, including instrumentation, arrangement and lyrics, as well as the finished “performance” and “vocals.”

Despite outcry from some musicians and fans, music made with Suno and Udio is resonating with listeners. It’s also further diluting an already shrinking income base for human musicians.

The creator of Xania Monet, an R&B “singer” generated by Suno, recently signed a $3 million record deal. The Velvet Sundown, a Suno-powered indie “band,” made headlines for getting a million plays on Spotify this summer. Last year, during the Drake-Kendrick Lamar beef, Metro Boomin went viral when he sampled the Udio-produced parody song “BBL Drizzy.” And just last week, Timbaland debuted his new Suno-made song by an AI “rapper” named Tata Taktumi.

AI is this century’s arms race, with world powers and tech giants battling for dominance in an arena that’s reshaping warfare, labor, energy and many other sectors, including the arts. And as record labels and power players in the music industry scramble to profit in this new landscape, musicians are raising concerns not only about what automation means for the value of their creativity, but larger cultural and free speech implications that come with increasing corporate control of an essential form of human expression.

Simply put, AI is here. The question many musicians are asking is, can they shape it to their benefit?

‘A woman who can’t say no’

Xania Monet was created by a poet named Telisha Jones, and its manager, Romel Murphy, says Jones writes all of Monet’s lyrics. “This is real music — it’s real R&B,” Murphy told Billboard. “There’s an artist behind it.”

Yet critics say the advent of AI-generated artists has dangerous implications not only for how music is made, but its role in political discourse. For a record label like Hallwood Media, which signed Monet, there are obvious benefits to working with AI-generated artists. The demands of the entertainment industry will never affect Monet’s mental or physical health; she’ll never fight for ownership of her music; and she’ll never make controversial statements that jeopardize her commercial appeal.

“There’s the obvious conclusion of taking away money and resources from artists who make a living this way, and who’ve dedicated our whole lives to this craft,” Bay Area-raised singer-songwriter Kadhja Bonet says. Even more dangerous, Bonet warns, is an entertainment landscape controlled by “giant, massive monopoly corporations who can feed us whatever ideas they want to feed us.”

Music has a lengthy history as a tool for advocacy and protest, and artists like Bonet worry that dissent will become increasingly stifled if AI-generated artists continue to proliferate. As she puts it: “They’ve created a woman who can’t say no.”

“What if we can have this Black artist that we know will never stand up for Black rights, right? That we know will never speak up for Palestine,” Bonet continues. “For [the companies], it’s incredible. For us as a culture, we lose tremendously.”

These technological innovations-slash-disruptions in music are taking place in a larger context, one in which tech giants build tools and leverage political influence to align themselves with far-right political movements and engage in war profiteering. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the AI weapons company Helsing, which named him chairman this past June.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who just pledged $15 billion to make San Francisco a global AI hub, this month suggested President Donald Trump should send the National Guard into the city.

Then there’s the labor aspect. For Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, a member of the New York punk band Downtown Boys and co-founder of the advocacy organization United Musicians and Allied Workers, the advent of AI-generated artists only accelerates a pattern of exploitation that has been part of the music industry since its beginnings.

“The corporations that have profited from musicians have always been trying to devalue musicians’ labor to take the artists out of the picture as much as possible,” he says.

DeFrancesco points to a well-documented, centurylong history of major record labels making millions off of Black artists who defined genres like jazz, blues, R&B, house and hip-hop, yet were never properly compensated for their talent and innovation. And though Black artists have been among Suno and Udio’s early adopters, it’s white music and tech executives who stand to profit the most.

Streaming services have much to gain from AI, DeFrancesco says. He points to Spotify’s yearslong practice of padding playlists with AI-generated music, which reduces the royalties it pays out to human artists. “Now they can just totally cut out the artists entirely, which I think has been their goal for a long time,” he says.

Thus far, AI-generated music has proliferated on Spotify alongside human-made music, with no way for listeners to distinguish the two. The streaming service says disclosures are coming. On Oct. 16, the $145 billion company announced that it’s working with major labels and AI companies to develop responsible AI tools.

“At Spotify, we want to build this future hand in hand with the music industry,” Co-President and Chief Product and Technology Officer Gustav Söderström says in a statement, “guided by clear principles and deep respect for creators, just as we did in the days of piracy.”

The AI copyright fight

AI models like Suno and Udio train on all the recorded music available on the internet, which has prompted accusations of theft from artists and record labels alike. “Inevitably, you’re going to lose that soul in an industry that could not operate without ripping off real human artists,” says Richmond hip-hop artist, tech educator and entrepreneur Kaila Love, who advocates for responsible uses of AI.

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, the “big three” record label conglomerates, filed a copyright lawsuit against Suno and Udio in 2024. In June 2025, almost a year later, the Wall Street Journal reported that the same three labels entered licensing negotiations with the startups.

In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Suno investor Antonio Rodriguez appeared to admit that lifting copyrighted material is simply part of the business model.

“Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it,” Rodriguez says. “I think they needed to make this product without the constraints.”

In court filings, both Suno and Udio rejected the labels’ claims of theft and say that they comply with fair use laws. They likened their AI models to human musicians who are simply influenced by what they hear. Representatives for both companies didn’t return KQED’s request for comment.

But music industry stakeholders aren’t buying it. Last month, Billboard published a dossier of evidence collected by the International Confederation of Music Publishers, which claims that companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI and X have trained their AI models on copyrighted material by major artists like the Beatles, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé.

“This is the largest IP theft in human history. That’s not hyperbole. We are seeing tens of millions of works being infringed daily,” ICMP director general John Phelan told Billboard. “Within any one model training data set, you’re often talking about tens of millions of musical works often gained from individual YouTube, Spotify and GitHub URLs, which are being collated in direct breach of the rights of music publishers and their songwriter partners.”

The battle over copyright has dominated the conversation over AI in music. But Creative Machines author Ackerman cautions that critics who focus their animus solely on copyright infringement ultimately benefit the corporate giants like Sony, Universal and Warner who own the majority of copyrighted material, not the working musicians who might see fractions of pennies for their Spotify streams.

“Whereas to argue directly for like, ‘Build tools that help us, not replace us’ — it’s a really simple argument that I don’t see enough of,” she says. “[These companies] are capable of doing it.”

Artists build their own tools

Rapper and tech educator Kaila Love calls herself “the AI Homegirl,” but she doesn’t waste any time before referring to AI-generated artists as “fake clones” in our interview. “We need to use AI to apply our creativity and build businesses around our music,” Love says.

It was precisely because of AI — namely, Daniel Ek’s weapons investments — that Love decided to take her music off Spotify in 2024 as an act of protest. Yet AI is also what enabled her to bounce back financially. Her company, Goalgetters AI, is a marketing service for artists that can create press kits, link pages for their social media bios and other assets in minutes.

Love used Goalgetters to create a marketing funnel for her own music. It started with an Instagram DM inviting fans to sign up on her website to get a free song download; after they opted in, they got an offer to buy her entire digital catalog for $5, then another for physical copies of her albums and a signed copy of her book, AI: The Bootleg Brain. With Spotify paying roughly $0.0035 per stream, she says she made far more money going direct-to-consumer than she would have on the streaming site.

“We need to use AI to apply our creativity and build businesses around our music,” she says.

Kadhja Bonet, who also removed her music from Spotify and other major streamers, believes collective ownership is the key for artists to resist exploitative forces in the music industry. She points to a forthcoming collectively owned platform called Subvert, which models itself after Bandcamp and is democratically governed by artists.

“I think we need to move to smaller co-op models,” Bonet says. “We need to refocus our creative output in these smaller outlets.”

While Bonet believes artists should divest from big tech altogether, others like DeFrancesco want to hold companies accountable. His advocacy group, United Musicians and Allied Workers, recently collaborated with U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan to reintroduce a new bill, the Living Wage for Musicians Act, which would create a new streaming royalty to give artists a greater share of profits. It includes specific language that would ensure the money only goes to human creators.

As artists navigate a tremendous upheaval of their industry at the dawn of the AI era, DeFrancesco says it’s crucial to build collective power. “We just haven’t had a way to fight back for so long.”