AI in the Music Industry - Collab Article

It is a widespread fact in today’s landscape that AI is not creative — it does not possess the capabilities to create art or media originally; it is nothing but extremely advanced pattern recognition.  

Using massive amounts of training data, artificial intelligence is taught the structure and appearance of the media it is aiming to reproduce — but when it is prompted to generate an original work, it can only regurgitate what it has been trained on.  

In essence, it creates a ubiquitous slurry of everything it knows. This creates an ethical quandary, especially with its employment in the music industry. Legally, most music can be used as training data under free and fair use. But for any artist who has had their music used as training data, they could rightfully ask themselves: “Am I being robbed?” It is impossible to know how much of a certain song or artist influences one specific AI generation, meaning these artists usually go uncredited and unpaid for the use and subsequent reuse of their work.  

Overall, we must consider whether, as a society, the use of AI is ethical to both the consumer and the artist? If not, how long can we allow this ethical injustice to continue?  

The human intention that AI cannot generate 

Artificial intelligence can now compose full songs in seconds, but what it cannot do is create art. Music has always been more than organised sound; it’s a deliberate act of communication. A human artist writes with intention: to provoke, comfort, challenge, or confess. Every choice, from a single chord change to the texture of a vocal line, is loaded with meaning because it carries the weight of lived experience. AI systems, by contrast, create by pattern-matching. They imitate the statistical shape of music without ever understanding what it feels like to make it. 

This is why so much AI-generated music feels lifeless. It can be catchy, polished, even eerily convincing, but it cannot be purposeful. A model cannot hope, mourn, love or regret, so it cannot embed those emotions into sound. It simply stitches together what millions of humans have already expressed, without grasping the intention behind any of it. 

The chart-topping AI tracks that briefly went viral this year illustrate the point. They captured attention for their novelty, not their emotional depth. People listened because the technology was impressive — not because the song had something to say. Once the curiosity faded, so did the music itself. There is nothing to return to because there was nothing there in the first place. 

Music resonates when it comes from someone who means it. Without intention, expression becomes imitation; without humanity, sound becomes noise. AI may generate songs, but only humans can make them worth listening to. 

Legality of AI in the Music Industry 

The rapid rise of AI-generated music, in which texts prompts can produce fully formed songs based on triggered major legal and ethical challenges for the music industry, prompting courts, record labels and lawmakers to reconsider how copyright applies in an era of machine-made creativity. In 2024, Universal music group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music group sued leading AI-music platforms Suno and Udio for alleged “mass copyright infringement” claiming these systems trained on copyrighted recordings without permission and generated outputs that closely resembled protected works, exposing the companies to statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringing song.  

However, over 2025 the landscape shifted to both Suno and Udio reached settlements with major labels, agreeing to licensed AI-music platforms that use authorised catalogues and give artists control whether their music, voices can be incorporated into AI-generated songs. These developments highlights a new legal consensus, AI-music is permissible when used as a took under licensed, transparent conditions, but unlicensed scraping of copyrighted works for training or imitation remains a serious infringement risk, signalling a future in which human creators retain control while AI operates within structured rights respecting frame works. 

Source: The guardian/Forbes 

Sources: 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/13/ai-music-spotify-billboard-charts 

EDWARD, BETH, LIZA, LILY K, IZZY G