The Pop Corporation

The encroachment of artificial intelligence in music is a very real problem and, largely, the businesses that make up the music industry have been somewhat slow to take any real stance on it outside of eyeing up financial opportunities, leaving it to musicians to voice their concerns.

Well, something is happening with Apple Music where their users will now be notified if they are listening to music made with AI. This goes a little way for some of the transparency wanted by some, but isn’t necessarily doing anything to curb it.

Either way, there’ll be tags the platform will push for distributors to use when AI-generated content has been used. The onus is on distributors being honest enough to mark their own music, but this may soon change as Apple suggest that they will soon ‘require’ this information when uploading to the service.

They say that this is a “concrete first step toward the transparency necessary for the industry to establish best practices and policies that work for everyone”, and that they want to “remain focused on maintaining a level and fair playing field for all creators and content providers alike.”

What the penalty for failing to do mark your music as AI generated isn’t clear, and nor do we know when this will be officially happening.

Elsewhere, Bandcamp has banned AI-created tracks, being more forthright, saying: “We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI-generated.”