
Music streaming service Tidal announced it won’t pay royalties for AI-generated music in an announcement on its website published Monday.
“Tidal’s priority is ensuring royalties go to original works directly produced, written, and performed by people,” the announcement reads. “We will therefore not knowingly attribute royalties to music we identify as wholly AI-generated.”
Like much of the internet, music streaming services are flooded with AI-generated slop. Spotify promised to fight AI spam with labeling and filtering but also embraced the broader trend of AI music. AI-generated bands like The Velvet Sundown and Breaking Rust have millions of listens on Spotify and make the service money. In May, Spotify announced a deal with Universal that would let fans create “covers and remixes of their favorite songs.”
Tidal is trying something different. The streaming service isn’t a giant in the field — Apple Music, YouTube, and Spotify dominate the charts — but it’s built a reputation by collaborating with artists, giving them a bigger cut of the streaming profits, and focusing on delivering high quality versions of audio. Tidal is the streaming service for listeners obsessed with bit-rate and FLAC*. It’s for people who have $200 digital-to-analog converters next to their computer.
The company said it won’t pay for “wholly” AI-generated music but it also said it won’t remove AI-tainted music from the platform entirely. Like Spotify before it, Tidal said it’s going to work to identify the AI slop on its platform, label it, and hold AI-generated music to a “higher standard of content integrity.” Spotify said something similar last year, but there are still plenty of unlabeled AI-generated tracks on the platform.
Tidal added that it won’t remove AI-tainted music entirely. “Artists should have the freedom to create with AI tools, and listeners should have the autonomy to choose the type of content they consume,” it said. Presently, The Velvet Sundown and Breaking Rust are both live on Tidal.
TIDAL is a global, experiential, entertainment platform built for fans, directly from artists around the world. TIDAL members enjoy exclusively curated content that directly connect artists with their fans in multiple ways. The service offers high-fidelity, CD sound quality music, high resolution video, an opportunity to discover new artists via TIDAL Discovery, and unique experiences via TIDAL X. TIDAL is available in more than 46 countries, with more than a 40 million song catalog and 130,000 high quality videos.
* FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. It is a popular, open-source digital audio format that compresses music files without discarding any original audio data.




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