The American Federation of Musicians is drawing a line between the record labels’ AI licensing deals and the musicians whose performances made those deals valuable in the first place.
The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) launched its Human Made, Human Paid campaign this week, calling on the major record labels to recognize a fundamental principle: Musicians should have a say in whether their performances are used to train generative AI systems, and they should be compensated when those performances are exploited.
The campaign comes as the AFM prepares to resume negotiations with Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music and Disney’s Hollywood Records on November 3 over a new Sound Recording Labor Agreement (SRLA), the collective bargaining agreement governing employment conditions for musicians who perform on recordings.
The union’s demands are straightforward: consent, credit and compensation. Musicians should be able to approve or reject AI uses of their performances, receive appropriate attribution and participate financially when the labels license recordings to AI companies.
But the dispute is about considerably more than another royalty provision. It goes to the heart of who has the authority to license the human performances embedded in sound recordings and whether the owners of recording copyrights can bargain away interests that belong to individual performers.
The record companies originally sued the AI developers for copyright infringement, alleging unauthorized copying of protected sound recordings. But as the companies moved toward settlements and commercial licensing arrangements, the performers whose work was captured in those recordings faced a very different question: Where was their compensation?
AFM International President Tino Gagliardi put the union’s position succinctly: “The record labels cannot pocket profits built on the backs of human artistry while cutting working musicians out of the equation.”
The AFM argues that the labels cannot simply collect AI licensing revenue while disregarding obligations to the session musicians who performed on those records.
The missing rights in the AI licensing debate
The AFM campaign also highlights an important distinction that has been largely overlooked in the AI licensing debate.
A record label may own the copyright in a sound recording, but that does not necessarily mean it owns every right implicated by the use of that recording to train or operate a generative AI system.
Performers may possess independent contractual rights, rights of publicity or other protections relating to their voices, identities and performances. Those interests do not automatically transfer to the record company simply because the performer participated in a recording session.
This becomes particularly important when an AI system can imitate not only a composition or recording but the recognizable characteristics of an individual performer, including vocal timbre, phrasing or instrumental technique.
The AFM’s demand for consent therefore addresses a question that cannot necessarily be resolved by negotiating a copyright license with a record label.
Digital replica protections are a subset of performer identity protections, not a substitute for them. Whether the exploitation involves a digital replica or some other appropriation of a performer’s identity, the underlying rights are distinct from copyright. Ownership of a sound recording, including ownership under a work-for-hire agreement like the SRLA, does not itself convey the performer’s right of publicity. A copyright license is not a license of personal identity.
The Artist Rights Symposium 5 is coming on October 19 at Tweed Recording in Athens, GA hosted by the University of Georgia Terry College of Business Music Certificate Program and the School of Policy and International Affairs, and the Artist Rights Institute. More about the Symposium here and register on Eventbrite here.
As AI companies like Suno and Udio settle copyright lawsuits with record companies and music publishers, they introduce new licensing arrangements. Artists and songwriters may be offered the “opportunity” to “opt in” to the settlements and “new revenue streams”. But not all revenue streams are equal, remember streaming? Remember “Let’s help that plucky startup Spotify”? We have seen this movie before and we know how it ends.
Why a Suno Copyright Settlement Is Different from Spotify, LimeWire—or Even Bartz
The music industry has settled copyright infringement disputes before. Spotify’s mechanical royalty settlements in David Lowery’s class action resolved claims over unpaid or improperly licensed compositions. LimeWire’s settlement addressed unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted recordings. In both cases, the essential bargain concerned compensation for past copyright infringement, not permission to reproduce the identity of the human beings who created the music. Identity theft never came up.
Suno presents a fundamentally different problem. Its generative AI technology can potentially reproduce not merely copyrighted expression but recognizable characteristics of an artist’s voice, performance and identity—what Chris has called personhood signals. A settlement that licenses recordings for future training may therefore implicate rights that neither the record company nor publisher controls. That’s why they need the “opt in” agreement to waive these rights because the AI platform doesn’t want to pay for the artist’s identify if the artist would even consider that deal. Many artists and songwriters, if not most, will not.
The Bartz v. Anthropic settlement illustrates the limitation of treating AI disputes exclusively as copyright cases. Bartzcompensates copyright owners for specified historical conduct involving pirated books. It settles the claims brought in litigation, so does not expressly resolve the separate problem of extracting and commercializing human identity. That is what a conventional copyright settlement misses.
Settling infringement of the work does not settle exploitation of the person. And no copyright settlement should quietly become consent to commercialize someone’s voice, identity or personhood.
So artists, their managers and lawyers are asking, what exactly are we being asked to agree to this time? Before you even get to the “new revenue stream,” an opt-in for an apparent copyright settlement may also include permission for future AI training, broad releases, perpetual covenants not to sue, or waivers of an artist’s rights in their name, voice and identity. These are fundamentally different transactions, with potentially permanent consequences. Before signing, creators need to understand not only what they will be paid, but what rights they are surrendering, how those rights may be exploited, and whether they can ever get them back.
Chris Castle will lead the closing panel at Artist Rights Symposium 5, that warns “Beware the AI Opt-In: Hidden Right of Publicity Waivers.” The panel brings together four speakers with complementary perspectives on artist advocacy, litigation and music-industry licensing.
Jen Jacobsen, Artist Rights Alliance. Friend of the show Jen Jacobsen is a long time artist rights advocate who brings the artist-advocacy perspective, focusing on meaningful consent, transparency and protecting musicians from agreements that may surrender irreversible grants of rights with hidden waivers.
George Zelcs of Korein Tillery. George Zelcs is the lead counsel on the Jason Isbell/David Lowery personhood class action against Suno to help us understand the implications of “opt in” agreements with waivers on rights of publicity and the practical question of what remedies artists should retain.
Gwendolyn Seale — Gwen Seale PLLC. Gwen brings experience representing songwriters and music copyright owners, with particular relevance to licensing authority, co-writer and co-owner interests, compensation and contractual protections.
Tim Kappel — Wells Kappel. Tim is a copyright expert and artist rights advocate who successfully argued in federal trial court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that his client Cyril Vetter should retain foreign rights as part of a statutory copyright termination— a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The panel is scheduled for 3:00–4:00 p.m. on October 19.
Three Deals Disguised as One?
An AI opt-in may combine three distinct transactions as part of the copyright settlement and go-forward license: compensation for past unauthorized uses (probably not shared by the label, but check), licensing for future model training, and revenue sharing from products built on those models (but don’t hold your breath). But accepting settlement compensation for yesterday’s conduct should not automatically mean consenting to tomorrow’s exploitation.
There may also be a fourth transaction: authorization to use an artist’s name, voice, likeness or other personhood rights which could not have been brought by a record company or music publisher because they do not control those rights.
A copyright license is not permission to commercialize personhood.
The panel will examine how these rights can become entangled, particularly when record companies, publishers or other representatives may not control all the rights an AI company seeks.
What Happens After You Sign?
The panel will address the questions that can be overlooked when attention focuses on the size of a settlement or the promise of future royalties.
What exactly is inside the AI company’s “walled garden”? How are revenues attributed to particular recordings or compositions? Can users generate synthetic voices or prompt an artist’s name? Can artists examine the product before consenting?
And what happens when an artist wants out later when the term expires (if there is a term)? Deleting a source recording does not necessarily remove its influence from an already-trained model. Termination, machine unlearning, continuing model exploitation and rights that survive expiration may determine whether an opt-in becomes a one-way door in an AI Hotel California.
The Artist Rights Symposium V is coming on October 19 at Tweed Recording in Athens, GA hosted by the University of Georgia Terry College of Business Music Certificate Program and the School of Policy and International Affairs, and the Artist Rights Institute. More about the Symposium here and register on Eventbrite here. We’ll be posting panel overviews to introduce you to the speakers, this post is about the connection between data center opposition and artist rights.
When AI Comes for Your Dreams
Artificial intelligence is usually presented as something almost immaterial: software in the cloud, trained on data, producing an answer, an image or a song at the push of a button. But there is nothing immaterial about the massive physical infrastructure behind it.
Does somebody else’s need for your property give them the right to take it?
That is the connection we’ll explore at Artist Rights Symposium V with Ansley Brown; Georgia State Senator Sonya Halpern; and Dr. Moiya McTier of the Human Artistry Campaign and Moderator Chris Castle of Artist Rights Institute—bringing together community, public-policy and artist-rights perspectives on different sides of the same extraordinary AI buildout.
The panel highlights the increasingly important connection between data center protests and artist rights, bringing together leading human-creator advocates with a prominent Georgia community advocate whose family home was taken for data centers.
The panel will examine how AI not only depends on scraping vast swaths of human culture, but also requires enormous data centers, staggering amounts of electricity and water, sprawling new transmission infrastructure—real land in real communities. Someone bears the costs when family farms, homes and intellectual property become inputs to the AI economy.
Readers of the Data Center Backlash SITREP will remember Ansley Brown and her family’s fight in Coweta County, Georgia, where a proposed hyperscale data-center development brought AI’s extraordinary power demands quite literally to her doorstep—including Georgia Power’s effort to use eminent domain to take her family home for data center transmission lines.
Today is the day we say goodbye to my childhood home. Soon to be demolished by Georgia Power for the data centers. Thank you to ALL of you, we wouldn’t be so gracious about it if it weren’t for all the support. pic.twitter.com/1Fj7BFQqPE
Ansley did not set out to become a public advocate. She became one because a multibillion-dollar development threatened something deeply personal: the home and life her family had built in Coweta County, Georgia.
But Ansley’s story is also the story of thousands like her across America—and, indeed, around the world—as communities confront unprecedented demands for land, electricity, water and transmission capacity to support the accelerating AI buildout. At the same time, creators are watching their works appropriated by AI platforms that flood the attention economy with AI-generated content that competes directly with the human works used to build those systems.
Who bears the cost when someone else’s dream is reduced to an input for AI?
Artists have been asking essentially the same question—whether they’re protesting data centers next to the Nashville Zoo or suing to protect their works and personhood from unauthorized AI exploitation. Songwriters, recording artists, musicians, actors, writers and other creators have watched their work become an input into enormously valuable AI systems—without consent or compensation, if there even is a price for taking their dreams.
The AI economy has both i nputs and infrastructure. It needs creative works to build its products, and it needs land, power and water to run them. The legal issues are different, but the underlying question is remarkably similar: Ansley has described the human consequence in memorable terms: having to take the dream you built in one place and try to recreate it somewhere else—somewhere you hope will be safe from the next wave of AI development.
A family home and an artist’s life’s work are very different kinds of property. But neither becomes free for the taking merely because somebody else needs it to build a business.
What happens when the price of somebody else’s technological dream is that you have to surrender your own?
The Artist Rights Symposium V is coming on October 19 at Tweed Recording in Athens, GA hosted by the University of Georgia Terry College of Business Music Certificate Program and the School of Policy and International Affairs, and the Artist Rights Institute. More about the Symposium here and register on Eventbrite here.
We’ll be posting panel overviews to introduce you to the speakers, starting with the ticketing panel. From nonexistent World Cup tickets to a growing state-by-state push for resale reform, the ticketing debate is moving quickly. “Ghost Busters: How Fans, Artists, and Venues Are Fighting Back Against Speculative Tickets” will examine what artists, venues and lawmakers can do about ghost tickets, predatory resale and a secondary market increasingly disconnected from the artists who create the event.
The panel begins at 11:30 a.m. on October 19 at Tweed Recording with these experts:
Randy Nichols, a board member of the National Independent Talent Organization, leads NITO research and policy efforts addressing predatory resale practices. A longtime artist manager and entrepreneur, his advocacy draws on two decades of experience in the live-music business.
Jay Gilbert, co-founder of Label Logic and co-host of Your Morning Coffee, brings decades of music-industry experience, including executive roles with Universal, Sony and Warner and marketing campaigns for artists ranging from Nirvana and The Police to Bob Marley and Johnny Cash.
Moderating is Mala Sharma, co-founder and president of Georgia Music Partners, whose career spans record labels, artist management, entertainment banking, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and public policy.
The conversation: Who should control a ticket after it goes on sale—and how do we stop people from selling tickets they never owned in the first place?
In this short video, Gwendolyn Seale and Artist Rights Institute Director Chris Castle preview “The 39 Steps,” a Symposium V panel asking whether Section 115’s complex streaming mechanical formula should give way to a fixed per-stream penny rate with a COLA.
Gwen joins fellow attorneys Tim Kappel and Shannon Sorensen—all three represent clients before the Copyright Royalty Board in Phonorecords V. ARI Director and UGA professor David C. Lowery moderates. David teaches at the Terry College of Business Music Certificate program. He led the class action against Spotify over nonpayment of streaming mechanical royalties and is a class representative in the Isbell v. Suno class action.
Join us October 19, 2026, at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, for Artist Rights Symposium V hosted by Terry College of Business and the UGA School of Policy and International Affairs.
We’re pleased to announce that the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs has joined the Artist Rights Institute and UGA’s Music Business Certificate Program at Terry College as a sponsor of the fifth annual Artist Rights Symposium, October 19, 2026, in Athens, Georgia.
The addition of SPIA is especially timely. This year’s Symposium reaches beyond traditional music-industry issues to examine the broader public-policy consequences of artificial intelligence—from the massive data centers, energy infrastructure, and local communities supporting AI development to the legal and policy questions surrounding artist consent, identity, compensation, and the use of creative work.
Bringing together music business, law, public policy, artists, advocates, and policymakers is exactly what this moment requires.
Artist Rights Symposium V October 19, 2026 — Athens, Georgia Speakers and additional program details coming soon.
The American Music Fairness Act is still alive in the 119th Congress in the post-Labor Day political season, and with Congress heading toward the final stretch of the year, it is worth remembering both what the bill actually does and why it matters.
The basic proposition behind AMFA is remarkably simple: when terrestrial radio uses a sound recording to make money, the people who made the recording should be paid. That is not currently the law in the United States, and that’s what the #I Respect Music campaign is all about.
Songwriters and music publishers receive public-performance royalties when AM/FM radio plays a song. But the recording artists, background singers, session musicians and owners of the sound recording receive nothing for the terrestrial performance of that recording. Digital radio services, by contrast, already pay sound-recording performance royalties.
AMFA—S. 326 in the Senate and H.R. 861 in the House—would finally close that anomaly by extending the Section 106(6) sound-recording performance right to terrestrial audio transmissions and bringing AM/FM broadcasts within the Section 114 statutory licensing system.
One of the more persistent arguments against AMFA is that a new royalty would threaten small and community broadcasters. Congress has addressed that concern rather directly.
Under S. 326, a qualifying station with less than $100,000 in annual revenue would pay $10 per year. Qualifying public broadcasters with revenues between $100,000 and $1.5 million would pay $100 per year, while other qualifying stations in that range would pay $500. Those protections are limited to genuinely smaller operations; among other requirements, the station’s owner and affiliated entities must have aggregate revenues below $10 million. Let’s be real; that’s a fair deal for small broadcasters, come on.
For everyone else, the Copyright Royalty Judges would establish the rate. And Congress expressly tells the judges that they can consider radio’s much-invoked “exposure” value when determining that rate. (I’m so sure they’ll net out the indie payments, but hush my mouth.)
In other words, “radio promotes records” is not ignored by AMFA. It becomes an economic proposition that can be tested in an actual rate-setting proceeding rather than a vague slogan chanted by NAB lobbyists in sack cloth and ashes justifying a permanent entitlement for large broadcasters to use recordings for free.
There is another important feature of AMFA that deserves considerably more attention. The bill plugs a potential direct-licensing loophole. If a copyright owner directly licenses transmissions that otherwise could have been made under the Section 114 statutory license, the broadcaster doesn’t get to use that deal to contract the performers out of their statutory share. The transmitting entity must pay 50 percent of the applicable direct-license royalties to SoundExchange (the collective Congress designated to distribute Section 114 royalties), which then distributes the money according to the statutory performer allocations.
That protection is important. It means AMFA isn’t merely creating another revenue stream payable to record companies with the hope that something eventually trickles through an artist’s recording agreement around recoupment in the royalty waterfall. The legislation deliberately preserves a statutory payment path for featured and nonfeatured performers.
That’s an important piece of artist protection and one of the better features of the bill.
The reality is that AMFA is not sitting on the President’s desk. Neither chamber has reported the bill so far, and that’s the reality in the cold light of dawn. But— look at the Senate sponsorship.
S. 326 is led by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and now has Thom Tillis (R-NC), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) aboard. That is a 3–3 Republican/Democratic lineup, and importantly, Tillis chairs the Senate Judiciary Intellectual Property Subcommittee while Schiff is its ranking member.
That’s only six senators including the sponsor, so this is certainly not a 60-vote whip count. But six names don’t tell the whole story. Having the chairman and ranking member of the relevant subcommittee supporting the legislation is rather different from having six random cosponsors.
The Senate also did something important in December: it held an actual IP Subcommittee hearing on terrestrial performance rights, with Gene Simmons and SoundExchange President Michael Huppe making the case for performers and broadcasters presenting the opposing view. And when Gene Simmons makes the case before Congress (“the word ‘if’ is for losers….”) and in his Washington Post op-ed, that’s a sight to behold and is must-see TV if you haven’t watched it.
AMFA support in the House of Representatives is also bipartisan. H.R. 861 is sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), with support that crosses the aisle, including our long-time supporters Jerry Nadler and Ted Lieu. The House bill has accumulated additional cosponsors since introduction, although it likewise has not yet been reported from Judiciary.
So call the whip count what it is: not enough yet, but unusually well positioned institutionally for a music bill that hasn’t moved through committee. And let’s be clear—fighting the National Association of Broadcasters is tough work, right up there with the Augean Stables and Sisyphus. Although closer to the Stables in our opinion.
That brings us to the calendar. There isn’t much legislative runway remaining in the 119th Congress, and AMFA still faces formidable opposition from the broadcast lobby. A conventional committee-to-floor path is getting increasingly difficult. But Congress will return after the November elections, and that is where things could get interesting before January 3, 2027 when unpasted bills die.
Music legislation has a history of moving when bipartisan agreement finally intersects with a legislative vehicle. The Music Modernization Act itself ultimately became a package containing several pieces of music legislation and passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
AMFA now has something it did not have at the beginning of this Congress: a Senate hearing, bipartisan support from the leadership of the relevant IP subcommittee, bipartisan sponsorship in both chambers, and a legislative record establishing both the case for paying performers and the protections afforded small broadcasters.
While that doesn’t guarantee anything, it does make AMFA a plausible candidate for a lame-duck legislative vehicle if the right copyright, intellectual-property or broader year-end package starts moving. Stranger things have happened.
And this is one of those issues where Congress has been “studying” the problem for a very long time. As SoundExchange CEO Mike Huppe reminded the Senate last December, the Senate Judiciary Committee actually reported the predecessor Performance Rights Act in 2009. It never reached the floor.
Seventeen years later, the underlying inequity is still the law: American radio broadcasters can build a commercial business around recorded performances without paying the performers for those performances. Digital services pay. Broadcasters in most other developed music markets pay. American terrestrial radio does not. Artists still die of exposure.
The American Music Fairness Act would finally change that.
Six Senate sponsors isn’t 60 votes. But with Blackburn, Tillis, Hagerty, Padilla, Booker and Schiff already aboard—and Tillis and Schiff occupying the two key positions on the IP Subcommittee—there may be enough bipartisan infrastructure here to keep watching very closely as Congress heads toward the lame duck.
Sometimes the last few weeks of a Congress are when supporters of legislation that has been waiting years finally ride Justice across the finish line.
The Artist Rights Institute and the University of Georgia School of Public Policy and International Affairs are pleased to announce Artist Rights Symposium V, to be held October 19, 2026, in Athens, Georgia at the School of Public Policy.
The fifth annual symposium will bring together artists, songwriters, musicians, academics, lawyers, policymakers, and other voices for a day of candid discussion about the rapidly changing legal, technological, and economic issues affecting creators.
The symposium will be moderated by David Lowery, Principal Lecturer in the Music Business Program at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business and co-founder of the Artist Rights Institute. As in previous years, the emphasis will be on hearing directly from the people whose livelihoods and creative work are affected by these changes.
Panels and speakers will be announced soon.
For now, save the date: October 19, 2026 — Athens, Georgia.
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