Hacker News

The flood of AI music on their platform is becuase people can make money off it. If you turn off that faucet you stop the flooding.

I'm curious about they will apply the part saying "AI-generated music will not be monetizable." What does AI-generated music mean, exactly? What if you make an AI generated bassline but produce the rest of a track by hand? How about an AI vocal? Or a mix of AI stems and your own recordings?

Tidal's terms and conditions (https://tidal.com/terms) say that:

> “AI-Generated Content” means any audio content, inclusive of musical works and sound recordings, that is wholly or substantially generated by generative artificial intelligence, with limited or no direct human creative input beyond an initial text prompt or similar instruction. ... You acknowledge that AI detection technology may produce false positives or false negatives.

And:

> If you use TIDAL Upload, your Tracks may be scanned for the purpose of identifying whether the content is AI-Generated Content, and to label such content accordingly on the Tidal platform. You acknowledge that such scanning and labeling is performed on a best-efforts basis and that Tidal shall not be liable for any inaccuracies in AI detection or labeling. AI-Generated Content uploaded to Tidal is not eligible for monetization. If you believe your Tracks were erroneously tagged as AI-Generated, you can reach out to support@tidal.com.

Tidal should simply ban AI generated music from upload if they are not willing to pay uploaders should the music become popular. Under these rules an AI generated country and western song that makes it to number 1 on the billboard chart makes Tidal money and the uploader nothing.

Not sure about the stated principal, but I do think it follows the policy nicely. Yes, you can upload your AI generated music, but it will be tagged as such, and you cannot profit from it.

Isn’t it true that AI generated music holds no legal copyright?

Really don't mean any offence to your comment because you probably mean well but I have little tolerance for the "reasonable"/fence-sitting kind of comments on this kind of issues.

If they really cared to much about empowering people creating things for other people, like others have pointed out, they should just ban it.

Sure, in reality it's not so easy to just ban AI content because there is a spectrum of it and it's really not a clear-cut problem.

But your stance can be clear-cut, and in this messy world where there is no perfect solution one way or the other, your stance matters even more. You could either be seen as a fence sitter who allowed slop to happen, or someone who stands with human creativity battling against shitty people and their slop.

Please stop this kind of fence-sitting reasoning if you care about people.

The difference between AI and artists is that artists are humans, which should grant them more rights and fewer penalties than some fucking software.

Artists don't get penalized, but for that reason, we should penalize the hell out of it.

If a bunch of hyper intelligent space aliens came in and started squeezing the rest of us out of creative economic activity, they shouldn't be on an equal playing field either. Laws and rules exist to serve humans, not machines.

Bandcamp is well on their way already. If you want to support actual musicians, you can just buy their music directly. https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/

Let me preface this by agreeing that we should have platforms for only human-generated music.

> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it.

Like most things, this is an overgeneralization. In general, I agree, but not always.

While most AI-generated content is not going to appeal to most people, it's wrong to say that all AI-generated music is not about what music is about. Personally I find _some_ AI generated music to be amazingly fun to listen to, but mostly it's parodies or works that are essentially built on top of existing media.

A creative person using AI well can produce art that people enjoy and which adds to our culture (I selectively choose not to say "create" here to avoid that very overloaded connotation w.r.t. AI creations). That is not to say that most of the work that comes out of AI needs to exist or does any of those things.

> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it

"art is in the eye of the beholder."

I listen to a lot of EDM, which can be very mechanical, but I personally have strong emotional connection to. I personally would welcome AI-generated music as an alternative to human-made.

To be clear: I do agree a "human-verified" system would be great, but I don't think it would be black and white. And I would guess that eventually AI music will be better than a lot of human made music.

A platform like that exists. It's called Subvert. It's a cooperative that was created as a response whenever Bandcamp has changed ownership several times. The idea of Subvert is to focus on the artists instead of the interests of the founders and investors.

As I stated elsewhere in the thread, the streaming platforms do not have the correct incentives to do this. It’s the labels that do releases that are correctly incentivized, as they need to build an audience that trusts them and enjoys the music that they release.

Independently-released music is a huge red flag. If you can’t find a single label A&R to support you, you may have to work on the quality of your output… music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are tens of thousands of labels across nearly every imaginable genre. Their role as gatekeeper is a valuable one.

> Tie it to in-person concerts and it might actually work as a business, as well as logistically

Don't give ticketmaster any ideas.

Baudelaire and many others said the same thing about photography.

That seems like a hard line to draw for EDM, which I suppose, plenty of people have indeed refused to class as "human-made" over the years.

You'd probably need to be more generally back-to-basics (instruments-only, no EDM).

Your statement is so imprecise as to be meaningless. Is EDM made on an Abelton DAW human made? Even though the human didn't touch an instrument and used a robot drummer? What about a human who uses AI to generate snippets of music and then pastes them together in an emotionally compelling way, much like HipHop artists do for traditionally sampled music? AI is a tool. Low/no-effort work on the part of humans is the problem.

Perhaps. But just how human made? We already had the “Depeche Mode isn’t real music because they just push play on a sequencer” debate 40 years ago.

And lots of composers can’t play the stuff they write. But the composition is human.

Then there’s emerging AI-supported music, since AI can come up with and test harmonic ideas far more sophisticated than most people. If a human’s saying “no, not that, try using an augmented sixth to get us from F#maj to Cmin”, is that human generated?

Not trying to be contrary, just saying the definition needs to be really clear, and that’s going to be difficult.

That would be interesting and could start simply. CDBaby was what, $20 per record and self-serve. Maybe each record on this new platform costs $200 and is accompanied by an employee-uploaded video of the artist uploading the record.

As of now, you can tell the difference for most AI generated music. There's some where you cannot. There is no Turing Test for taste, and the specific constellation of features that represent your particular interpretation of what things like human, best, goodness, excellence, beauty, and any other label you might apply to abstract qualities will be reproduced at a sufficiently high resolution that you will no longer be able to meaningfully discern between human and AI creations. In a blind test, you will prefer the AI product, and your own perceptions and biases will convince you that the AI generation is actually human, because whatever ineffable abstractions you attribute to "human" quality will be replicated, refined, and exploited.

The very act of recognizing some difference is the tool with which the next generation of outputs is refined, until it's so "good" for any and all particular instances of "good" that human perception is insufficient to differentiate the source.

At some point we're going to have to admit that the distinction based on source is a problem, and perhaps there's a lot of nuance in the context of any particular piece of media such that an arbitrary dismissal of a song, or image, or piece of writing, for the mere reason that AI was used to produce it in whole or in part is missing the point.

If you enjoy a song, your enjoyment is real. If you appreciate beauty, your perception of beauty is real. If you feel deeply about a written text, your feelings are real.

How you perceive things, while not entirely conscious, does involve elements of choice. Make the choice to judge things on meaningful merit, and if the next generation of musicians and artists use AI tools to explore new territory, don't dismiss their art and passion and creations out of hand.

An electric guitar is artificial. People used to make the same sorts of "that's not music" statements people are making now about music and art. Imagine being so twisted up over some arbitrary distinction that you miss out on Jimi Hendrix or BB King, or Joe Satriani, or any of the brilliant musicians that have wrung beauty and soul from "artificial" electronic signals.

For me personally, I no longer hear the difference between AI generated music and new pop-songs. Not sure what that says about me or the music industry.

This is all about streaming platforms commandeering royalties away from artists.

The way royalties get assigned is based on a percentage of your listening versus your monthly payment.

For example, spend an entire month listening to Taylor Swift’s new album, she gets the entire royalty share.

But if you listen to the album 100 times but then listen to lofi beats 900 times, Taylor only gets 10%.

The “earnings per stream” number you’ll see cited is only an average and varies greatly because there’s only so much money to go around since your listening is unlimited.

But now you have services like Spotify that are removing real songs from “mood” playlists and replacing them with AI music that directs royalties toward Spotify.

Another factor that has happened: record labels have been working to screw over artists so much that they actually negotiated lower royalty rates with Spotify in exchange for company stock.

Giving up royalties but then instead owning a part of Spotify effectively directs money away artists and toward the labels.

Why don’t they play indie alternative pop music? It’s easier than ever to create, surely there are many bands with almost no audience who would give away their music for free. The reason may be discovery, but they could band together and make a centralized platform.

I feel the same way, but it’s hard to draw the line: - was the song totally one-shot “make me a song in the style of X?” - was it a legit artist that used AI to create a verse lyric stanza after they’d already created the entirety of the melody/ chords etc?

This is the key point, they're all enforcing tagging with no means to filter it out entirely.

Agreed. Especially since there is similar functionality for explicit tracks

Nothing personal, but there's something hilarious about "I demand a quick and easy solution to a likely practically impossible problem once you get into details" -- in opposition to AI.

This is a discovery problem, and all the streaming platforms are trash at discovery because discovery is a long tail problem. That’s where record labels shine because of individualized A&R and tastemakers, which is why record label consolidation is antithetical to quality music output (edit: and diverse).

However, you’ll also notice that none of these streaming platforms highlight which record label is responsible for which release, though you can find it under additional info sometimes. Tin foil hat is that the large record companies don’t want such a feature to be present on streaming platforms. But more likely is that product employees at streaming platforms don’t think users care about record labels, which they’re right, 80% of users don’t currently care about which record label releases which track or recording.

Give me a streaming platform with “Label” as a first class entity that I can like, follow, etc. My theory is that it will produce a much healthier long tail, because trustworthy labels are already a robust source of non-AI music.

Spotify is the same. This impersonation ought to be illegal.

+1 - and what about an entirely AI generated song with a human who adds a 0.1 sec hum. Or even this hum is copypasted from another human generated song.

Would you really like to take action and earn less money? Morality is dead...

The whole “what is art” question has different answers for different people. Yes, for some, music is communication, but when I listen to metal in the gym it’s an adrenaline boost. When I listen to brain.fm, it’s for focus. When I listen to a rap song with an MC that’s great at storytelling, then it’s communication. Sometimes it’s just a utility though. I’ve played music for about 30 years - live, in bands, in my bedroom - played many instruments, written electronic music, made lots of noises. But I’m not always trying to communicate something. In fact I’m sometimes scared I don’t have anything good to say with my music. So I just play it.

I agree in sentiment, I love knowing that another human made this, either because I fancy I could maybe do something as good as that, or because I just admire the talent, or simply because the lyrics or music touch me somehow.

That said, there are a lot of people who simply enjoy having something playing in the background, it doesn't matter what, and if you're into country music it's great to have 10,000+ hours of country music to play.

If Tidal provides a checkbox so you can choose whether to exclude AI content, I think that would work for both audiences.

I mean you can outsource it to users, which also allows you to organically make exceptions for AI music that is actually popular.

You really just want your users, who hate AI, to see a big "REPORT AI" button they can click.

Maybe if enough AI produces self-report their work as AI, and enough non-AI producers are honest about uploading non-AI work, they'll quickly have the necessary amount of good-enough data to train good classifiers?

I feel like audio-level heuristics will be easier, but ultimately who's to say?

> Generative models synthesize sound mathematically. These synthesis methods leave unnatural dips, specific spectral noise profiles, or phase alignments that rarely occur in real, human-recorded audio

You are correct, but I think having a good policy - and trying earnestly to enforce it - is a good start, even if that enforcement is very imperfect.

Let's go with impossible.

Same here, and I've run into annoying technical issues too. I am on the verge of canceling, but this new AI-skeptical stance makes me want to give them another chance. Sometimes I like to listen to their stations instead of my own playlists, but if you leave them on long enough they will eventually start playing obvious AI slop. If they actually figure out how to let me filter out ALL AI generated music, then I will be a happy customer even when their app throws meaningless error codes at me instead of playing music.

I have a great solution. They can point chatGPT to their AI generated slop and get AI generated enjoyment from others appreciating their "Art". Meanwhile, keep that out of my sphere.

Honestly I don't know that I care about AI generated tracks, like you said it's the same argument one could make for samples or drum machines or synths or a dozen other previous technologies in the music space. What I actually miss is music curation and discovery, instead of a just a giant slop-pile of new music that I can't possible sort through, or an algorithm defines for me.

I'd love some Internet Pirate Radio. If someone wants to sort through the best all-AI tracks and run those, that'd be cool. I don't want an AI to pick the best AI tracks.

Works for me (TM). Maybe you lost CDN-lottery?

Works for me, they also emailed it to me this morning

That's a genuinely grim thought, but not unrealistic either. I'll have to chew on that one, it's interesting.

Same, although I prefer Endel. It’s a paid subscription, but their objective-focused playlists work really well for me. Relax, Focus, Deep Focus… very effective.

> A good argument is that therefore there is no reason to pay royalties on AI generated work as it is the equivalent to public domain.

That has some different second order consequences that I don't think you're seeing. It's not that they will be free to you as a user, it's more that they will be free from the platform perspective to do whatever they want with the revenue they get from it.

Say for example you have a platform with Spotify monetization scheme for instance, which is already very unfair to small artists. But now imagine you have to compete to be included on auto play or playlists against something that's basically free for Spotify, what's your chance of getting any money out of it? Say Spotify changes their algorithm and starts pushing 20% of all auto play playlists to consist of AI songs, that's basically a 20% bump on their profit basis.

It seems consistent to me. I'm not sure if suno represents the state of the art, but the output I've heard from there seems to be noticeably lower fidelity than a skilled amateur recording. In many cases, it's still more than good enough. But Tidal advertises things like "lossless", which is a much higher fidelity threshold than anything suno can produce, at least that I've heard. Crediting artists might be taken to mean crediting human artists whose creative output is represented by the music. Sending royalties to "AI musicians" displaces some of those potential payments.

So, their incentive is to promote AI music, since they don't have to pay royalties for them.

Maybe licensing existing tech, e.g. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/01/ai-generated-music-deeze...

RFC 3514 is being repurposed as an "AI Bit", all AI-generated content will be required to set this bit during transfers.

It will be super premium pro plan:)

it won't be monetized so there's zero incentive to upload AI slop to Tidal

If there's a market, then a competitor app with different policies will likely arise.

The other aspect that's missing from the discussion here is LEGAL. If Tidal is making money from stolen music -- although arguably they still are by offering it on a subscription basis -- then that opens them up to litigation. From that perspective, this may double both as risk-mitigation and also a marketing opportunity for them, would love an attorney to weigh in there.

(From the comments here, Spotify is the market leader and already pays out for AI generated music. But I can't say that independently.)

Then support your favorite AI music creators by going to their gigs.. oh wait

I appreciate a platform for art to at least attempt at maintaining the semblance of it being for humans. If AI 'artists' disagree, they can boycott Tidal and not post their songs there. For me that is a feature that I actually really value, because AI slop making Spotify money has materially worsened my experience in that platform.

That's the neat part: AI Slop "music" will have to stop pretending that it has any value.