Apple Music Will Soon Start Labeling AI-Generated Music

Apple Music will soon join other streaming services such as Tidal and Deezer that have started labeling AI-generated music on their platforms. In an email sent to music industry partners yesterday and seen by Billboard, the company announced a new « Made With AI » labeling system that will come into effect later this year.

Apple’s new initiative to make AI-generated music clearly identifiable will leverage the AI Transparency Tags it launched earlier this year. The new tags allow music creators to manually disclose when AI was used to create a material portion of their content.

“As we implement Made With AI Labels, content providers will be important partners,” Apple said in its email to music industry partners yesterday. “They are best positioned to know how their content was created, and the AI Transparency Tags that should be used.”

In recent years, the rising popularity of generative AI music creation platforms such as Suno and Udio has led to a flood of AI-generated content on streaming platforms. The French streaming service Deezer, which released a free AI music detector earlier this year, claimed that over 44% of the total number of tracks uploaded to the platform every day were AI-generated.

Spotify, the leading music streaming service on the market, does allow artists to disclose in song credits that they used AI in their music. However, these tracks aren’t clearly labeled as AI-generated. In September, the platform will start allowing artists to disclose that their profile represents an AI Persona instead of an “authentic” artist. By default, songs from AI Personas will be excluded from Spotify’s editorial and algorithmic recommendations.

Overall, there’s a clear need for an industry standard defining how AI-generated music should be treated on streaming services, and there’s already hope on that front. Last month, the RIAA, IFPI, and other music trade groups proposed a new initiative to add new AI labels to songs generated with AI, similar to how the current « E » label is applied to explicit tracks.