As part of our series highlighting selected objections to the NMPA-backed Phonorecords V Subpart B settlement, we turn to the filing of the Society of Composers & Lyricists (SCL), representing approximately 4,000 composers, lyricists, songwriters, and music copyright owners. SCL asks the Copyright Royalty Judges to reject the proposed settlement, arguing that it locks in an artificially low mechanical royalty base rather than genuinely preserving creators’ purchasing power.
SCL focuses particularly on what it calls the missing inflation of 2021 and 2022. Its objection argues that carrying forward the 12¢ benchmark fails to restore those unusually inflationary years and could perpetuate the resulting shortfall through every subsequent COLA adjustment. SCL objects that the NMPA settlement carries the Phonorecords IV formula into Phonorecords V in a way that effectively creates a new frozen mechanical. Rather than carrying forward the actual inflation-adjusted 2027 penny rate (for example), the settlement retains 12¢ as the benchmark, perpetuating the very rate-freeze problem Phonorecords IV’s COLA was intended to prevent.
SCL proposes instead a physical and permanent-download rate of approximately 15.6¢ beginning in 2028, followed by annual CPI adjustments which would take into account the 2021 and 2022 rates that the PR IV rates did not take into account in coming up with the 12¢ rate.
The filing also returns to a familiar issue from Phonorecords IV: vertical integration among the parties negotiating the settlement. SCL invokes the Judges’ own earlier warning that relationships linking major publishers and record labels can create inherent conflicts requiring scrutiny before a private agreement is transformed into rates binding the entire industry.
SCL also challenges the continued 24¢ ringtone rate, raises concerns about bundling, and disputes the proposition that agreement among major industry organizations necessarily represents a consensus of the individual creators whose statutory royalties will be determined.
Perhaps the filing’s central point is the simplest: an annual inflation adjustment cannot repair an incorrectly low starting point. SCL asks the Judges to reject the settlement and encourage a new negotiation that includes the views of independent creator organizations before rates are fixed for 2028–2032.
Continuing our series highlighting objections to the proposed Phonorecords V settlement for mechanical royalties on physical and permanent downloads, our friends Helienne Lindvall, David Lowery, and Blake Morgan focus on a deceptively simple question: What is the record that allows the Copyright Royalty Judges to conclude this settlement is reasonable? Our friends do not argue that settlement is improper—or even necessarily that this settlement is unreasonable. Instead, they argue that Congress assigned the Judges, not the negotiating parties, responsibility for determining whether a private agreement provides a reasonable basis for rates imposed industry-wide. There’s just no record other than the NMPA’s settlement itself.
The comment also questions carrying the 12¢ Phonorecords IV benchmark forward through another five-year rate period simply because it remains indexed for inflation. CPI preserves the real value of the existing benchmark; it does not establish that the benchmark remains reasonable for 2028–2032. With vertically integrated companies operating on both sides of the “settlement”, the commenters argue that the missing economic record matters even more.
It’s that time again. It’s no secret that we are not fans of the NMPA’s “quick and cheap” settlement on the statutory mechanicl license for physical and downloads which in its own way is essentially “take this eat that” freeze with no explanation that just extends the rates we fought for in the last rate setting. (David, Helienne and Blake filed a joint comment that we’ll get to posting in coming days.). Hard as it may be to believe, there’s no real record to support the NMPA settlement aside from “quick and cheap” and “we’re big.” Don’t think that that one appears in the rules anywhere.
But it turns out we are far from being the only ones who managed to achieve escape velocity from the influence of NMPA. Today we’re highlighting another submission in the Phonorecords V Subpart B proceeding before the Copyright Royalty Board.
In these comments, Kevin M. Casini and Kaila C. Coleman argue that the proposed settlement preserves inflation adjustments but does not reconsider whether the underlying 12¢ statutory mechanical royalty remains an appropriate benchmark for the 2028–2032 rate period. They contend that changes in the music marketplace—including the resurgence of vinyl, increased catalog values, and the continuing importance of physical formats for many independent writers—warrant closer examination.
One passage that stood out:
“The Board’s obligation extends beyond determining whether a proposed settlement has support among major industry participants. The Board must determine whether the resulting rates are fair, reasonable, and consistent with the objectives of the Copyright Act.”
As always, we’re featuring these comments to encourage readers to review the arguments being presented to the Copyright Royalty Judges.
The first settlement in the Phonorecords V mechanical royalty proceeding is now on file (see below). A settlement is supposed to result from a “voluntary negotiation,” so the document raises a simple question: when exactly did the negotiation happen?
The parties describe “conversations” with other participants. Maybe there were conversations. But conversations are not the same thing as negotiation. A proposal presented as essentially a finished product, with little or no opportunity to influence its terms, is notification—not negotiation.
The Parties have had settlement conversations regarding the so-called Subpart B rates and terms with the other copyright owner Participants in the Proceeding (Songwriters Guild of America, World Collections, Inc., Eight Mile Music Companies, and George Johnson), who declined to join this settlement.
That distinction is crucial because this settlement would establish the statutory mechanical royalty rate for physical records and permanent downloads starting in 2028 through 2032. Those rates affect every songwriter, including those ex-US songwriters whose songs are exploited in the US. According to sources overseas, ex-US songwriter groups were not consulted, although it is customary for NMPA and NSAI to not engage with them even though they are a significant group (other than major mostly English language songwriters who are represented in the US by major publishers).
This means that it is likely that an alternative proposal or several alternative proposals will come to the Copyright Royalty Board in coming days from those who were not included in the NMPA’s settlement. As the settlement itself anticipates, whatever deal the Judges end up adopting will be published as a tentative ruling allowing public comment, but that’s down the line. Watch this space or the CRB website for Phonorecords V for more on deadlines, etc., if you want to comment.
To our knowledge, this is also the first time we’ve seen multiple competing settlements in a CRB phonorecords proceeding. Multiple settlements are common in webcasting and other CRB cases because different categories of music users—commercial broadcasters, NPR, college radio, religious broadcasters, and others—often negotiate different deals tailored to their own services. Mechanical royalty proceedings have traditionally been different. Everyone is negotiating one statutory rate that applies across the board divided into two broad categories by music user: labels (who pay for physical and downloads), and digital services like Spotify, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta (who pay for streaming mechanicals and control the global streaming market and some of which largely control AI models so lead the charge on AI theft for training).
The settlement itself also leaves some obvious questions unanswered.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing every aspect of music licensing, yet AI is not mentioned at all in the settlement. If downloads or streaming services increasingly contain AI-generated tracks that may not even qualify for copyright protection, should those recordings receive statutory licenses or royalties at all? The Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that works lacking sufficient human authorship cannot be registered for copyright to enjoy the protections of the Copyright Act, and the statutory license is part of the Copyright Act. If that principle eventually affects downloads or streaming (which we think it does right now), it is difficult to imagine that it will never influence the economics of physical or download mechanical royalties as well. That issue received no attention in the NMPA’s settlement.
Then there is another provision that deserves far more discussion.
The settlement continues the existing CPI adjustment mechanism that songwriter’s fought for in the last rate setting that increased the mechanical rate from the frozen 9.1¢ proposed by the NMPA and major labels to 12¢ plus a “Cost of Living Adjustment” (or “COLA”) thanks to the Judges rejection of the extended freeze. In other words, they did the opposite of what we recently suggested in Don’t Freeze Mechanicals Again.
Adopting a 12¢ base rate makes no sense—that’s the same rate as the Judges took as the base rate for the first year of the five year rate period starting in 2023 and then applied the COLA to that rate in subsequent years. Of course, that 12¢ rate has been eroded by inflation every year and is now worth about 10¢ without the COLA, but songwriters negotiated and received that COLA which sustained the value of the rate. That’s how we got from 12¢ in 2023 to the current 13.1¢ rate in 2026 that will probably increase again for 2027 (our guess is somewhere in the 13.4¢ to 13.6¢ range). Why wouldn’t you just take that highest rate achieved during the last year of the Phonorecords IV period (2027) and start applying the COLA to that in the first year of the Phonorecords V period (2028)? Rather than go back to the arbitrary 12¢ reference rate? Huh?
On its first glance, adopting a COLA for the new rates sounds reasonable because it protects songwriters against inflation. But the formula contains no floor preventing the statutory rate from declining if cumulative CPI were ever to fall.
Deflation may be unlikely. That’s not the concern. But the COLA could still cause rates to decline. All that has to happen is that inflation doesn’t rise at the same rate or greater from one year to the next and then the COLA-adjusted statutory rate will decline.
The point is that, for what may be the first time in the history of the statutory rate and certainly since the modern Copyright Act took effect in 1978, songwriters are being asked to accept a statutory mechanical royalty structure under which the minimum statutory rate could actually move backward, and very likely will decline.
A simple solution exists. The regulation could easily provide that each year’s rate is the greater of (1) the COLA-adjusted calculation or (2) the prior year’s rate. That would preserve the existing inflation formula while ensuring the statutory royalty never declines.
Why wasn’t that included? Or better yet, why wasn’t an actual value based increase included since we are still digging out of two prior freezes of the statutory rate one from 1909-1978 when the rate froze at 2¢ and the other from 2006-2022 when the rate froze at 9.1¢.
That’s a fair question.
So is another one.
If we’re going to lock in the statutory mechanical royalty through 2032, shouldn’t there have been a meaningful discussion—not just among the settling parties, but across the songwriting community—about AI, future valuation, whether there should be a statutory minimum for streaming and whether the statutory minimum itself should ever be permitted to decrease?
Those conversations are coming. The only question is whether they should have happened before the settlement was filed instead of afterward. We had hoped for a longer table with more voices. Whether that happens remains to be seen.
Good afternoon to every one of you, whether you’re here in this room or joining us online. It is a pleasure to welcome you all here today and I want to thank MEDAA, la Maison européenne des Autrices et des Auteurs, for hosting today’s ECSA conference on “Authors’ Rights and Music Streaming in the Age of AI”. ]
I am Helienne Lindvall, songwriter and the President of ECSA, the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance. ECSA represents 57 professional music authors’ associations and more than 30,000 composers across 29 European countries. I am honoured to be here today with fellow composers, songwriters, policymakers, and representatives from Europe’s cultural and creative sectors.
I am particularly grateful to welcome Henna Virkkunen, the Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy at the European Commission. Ms. Virkkunen – thank you again for joining us. We are all looking forward to hearing your opening remarks in just a moment.
I also want to thank three Members of the European Parliament for their participation: Emma Rafowicz, co-rapporteur on the Agora EU programme, Axel Voss, rapporteur on the recent report on copyright and generative AI, and Hélder Sousa Silva, who will draft the forthcoming report on the Cultural and creative sectors in the age of AI.
We would also like to express our deepest gratitude to all the speakers who will contribute their time and expertise today. And remember that this conference would not be possible without the support of the Creative Europe programme.
So, Authors’ Rights and Music Streaming in the Age of AI? Let me first take a step back to 2016. Ten years ago, the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, called artists and creators “Europe’s crown jewels”. He said their works should be protected and they should be paid fairly.
Three years later, the EU adopted the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. We applauded it, for enshrining appropriate and proportionate remuneration, for increasing transparency in contracts, and for strengthening author’s rights on content-sharing platforms. Seven years on, where do we stand?
Well, the truth is that the principle of appropriate and proportionate remuneration is still too often circumvented in practice, in particular through buyout practices, but also when it comes to other online exploitation, such as streaming.
And then came generative AI. Adopted at a time when generative AI was barely existing, the Directive does not mention AI anywhere.
But it does include text and data mining exceptions, designed to help universities and researchers, discover new trends and gaining new knowledge. Supposedly with minimal harm to authors and other rightholders.
The reality? When not simply ignoring EU rules, global AI companies have exploited those exceptions far beyond their intended purpose. They’ve scraped and used all our works without consent, without transparency, and without remuneration. The harm to music authors isn’t minimal—it’s maximal. AI-generated content now imitates and substitutes us.
Some say “You could have opted out.” But here’s the truth: AI companies scraped everything – looting the entire history of musical works – before we had a fair chance to opt out and even know how to opt out.
To quote Baroness Beeban Kidron, the director of Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason: “Should shopkeepers have to opt out of shoplifters? Should victims of violence have to opt out of attacks? Should those who use the internet for banking have to opt out of fraud? I struggle to think of another situation where someone protected by law must proactively wrap it around themselves on an individual basis.”
And for a songwriter like me—working with co-writers, different CMOs, publishers, and labels—opting out is practically impossible. And even if it was possible, we would be naive to believe it would be respected. How would we even know if it were, when there is no transparency?
The AI Act’s implementation hasn’t helped. Its transparency rules are weak. Trade secrets protect massive theft. Imagine a fast-food manufacturer who had stolen all the ingredients that went into their products, refusing to reveal what the ingredients are or where they came from, calling it a “trade secret”. Then demanding it should be up to the farmers to prove it was their produce that was stolen. That’s what we’re dealing with.
Coca Cola may have a secret recipe, but it still has to display what went into each bottle, and pay its suppliers. It shouldn’t be up to creators to prove AI companies used our works. They should be required to get our consent and to be transparent. Or we should presume — correctly — that they already scraped the entire web.
Yes, a few licensing deals have been signed in the past year — between a couple of major labels and AI companies, usually after litigation, and mostly in the US. But we know next to nothing about the details of those deals – or whether composers and songwriters will benefit in any way, despite it being our works that have been stolen and exploited.
Licensing shouldn’t only be available to those with the muscle to sue. In Europe, where we claim to cherish our artists and cultural diversity, survival of the fittest cannot be the answer. AI companies have ingested ALL the music available online. It makes no sense that only the most powerful get a license and get paid, when they only supplied a fraction of the ingredients. And let me be clear: we are not against AI. It can be a helpful tool in our workflow as creators. We are simply against unlicensed AI.
Generative AI companies must act ethically. They must work with us—not profit from our work without consent and at our expense. That’s the only way to rebuild trust between creators and AI companies. Currently, the AI landscape is like the Wild West, and AI startups that want to act ethically cannot compete when there is a shop next door selling stolen goods.
Let’s be honest, the current framework is misinterpreted and applied far beyond its original purpose. It has created a high level of uncertainty that only benefits global generative AI companies to the detriment of creators. We cannot wait for courts to decide policy. We cannot rely on opaque deals between big corporations where the money rarely trickles down to creators.
This isn’t the time for sticking plasters [or Band Aids] on a wooden leg. It’s time for policymakers to be bold. The good news: not only the Pope but also many EU Member States and the European Parliament are showing the way. The recent Voss report on Copyright and Generative AI recognizes that AI systems rely massively on protected works—exploited without authorization or compensation. It recommends:
• Full transparency for AI training, including a rebuttable presumption of use for any AI service operating in the EU; and
• A new legislative initiative to clarify licensing rules and establish a functioning market.
We fully support this. We need a framework that:
1. Enables fair remuneration for creators
2. Ensures EU copyright law applies to all services operating in the EU.
3. Addresses the substitution and dilution of human creation by AI output
4. Ensures collective management can deliver appropriate and proportionate remuneration to all creators—big and small
The Parliament has also insisted that digital platforms must act against AI fraud and manipulation. And it is not the first time – the European Parliament’s report on music streaming, adopted in 2024, already did so, with many other recommendations to improve the identification of creators on music streaming platforms and ensure more transparency in algorithms and recommendation systems, as well as when it comes to AI generated music.
For composers and songwriters, streaming fraud through AI is a critical issue. In April, Deezer reported that 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks are uploaded daily to the platform – that’s 44% of all uploads. In March, a man in the US pleaded guilty to defrauding streaming platforms with AI-generated tracks, generating millions in royalties. Fraudsters impersonate real artists, upload fake songs to their profiles, and steal their royalties. This isn’t just an economic issue. It’s ethical – it’s a massive violation of moral rights and personal data.
And it threatens citizens’ trust in the authenticity of digital content. That’s one of the many reasons why we welcome MEPs Rafowicz and Kuhnke’s draft report on AgoraEU, which rightly prioritizes human creativity over AI-generated works.
We also warmly welcome this proposal for a dedicated music strand that can address the concrete challenges and structural imbalances impacting the sector, such as increasing market concentration, artistic freedom, fair remuneration and the growing dominance of digital service providers.
Today, 26 organisations from across the European music sector published a statement to support this draft report and encourage all MEPs to give the music sector the support it deserves.
Now, let me conclude: Our plea today is simple: The promise made to Europe’s crown jewels in 2016 remains unfulfilled: The exceptions designed to help researchers and generate information now fuel billion-dollar companies that exploit us. The transparency we were promised is hidden behind trade secrets. The licensing market that should exist is reserved for those who can afford the most expensive lawyers in the US. This must change.
We call on European policymakers to act with courage. With the European Parliament, we call for an additional legal framework, one that can finally uphold the key principles of transparency, consent and remuneration and encourage a well-functioning licensing market. This is not about adding more regulation This is to rebalance a framework that is fundamentally flawed, far from its intended purpose and Europe’s most fundamental values.
Europe must decide: will it stand with its creators, or stand by while our works are taken without consent? Let us become once again Europe’s crown jewels.
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 03: A mobile billboard sponsored by Human Artistry protesting Suno’s use of AI is pictured on display during Suno’s annual meeting on June 03, 2026 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for Human Artistry Campaign)
On June 3, 2026, as investors and technology executives gathered at the UBS AI in Entertainment Summit at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, a plane circled overhead carrying a simple message: “SAY NO TO SUNO.” A second banner could just as easily have read, “Stealing Music Is Bad Karma.” The scene was more than a protest against a single AI music company. It was a reminder that technology itself is neither good nor evil; what matters is how humans choose to use it. Throughout history, some of the most transformative technologies have been driven by the same motivations that power every bully: greed and fear. Fear of being left behind. Fear of missing out. Greed for market share, dominance, and wealth and crushing anyone who gets in the way. The generative AI race increasingly appears to be driven—and corroded—by both.
That is why the protest above Santa Monica was about more than music. It connected directly to a broader national backlash against the infrastructure being built to support the AI economy. Across the United States, communities are fighting data centers, transmission lines, water consumption, tax subsidies, and industrial development projects that many believe are being imposed without meaningful public consent. Residents from Texas to Georgia to Louisiana are asking the same basic question: who benefits, and who pays the price?
In the case of generative AI, artists argue that they are among those paying the price.
The Human Artistry Campaign demonstration took place on the same day that Suno announced a funding round exceeding $400 million at a valuation of approximately $5.4 billion. Let it not be said that music has no value and that Suno is not free riding on a thriving market to extract their absurd valuation.
While Silicon Valley investors celebrated another milestone in AI’s rapid expansion, the protest highlighted an uncomfortable reality: much of the value being created by generative AI companies originates from extracting human expression while paying no regard whatsoever to those humans. Whether the source material is music, visual art, photography, authors, voice performances, or other creative works, creators continue to ask how their contributions found their way into commercial AI systems and demand the right to say no to Suno.
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 03: A plane sponsored by Human Artistry protesting Suno’s use of AI is pictured on display during Suno’s annual meeting on June 03, 2026 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for Human Artistry Campaign)
The narrative that the AI labs want you to focus on is often framed as a conflict between innovation and regulation. That framing misses the point. The real question is whether innovation requires the abandonment of consent, compensation, and accountability. Human Artistry’s message was not anti-technology. Rather, it was that technology should serve human beings rather than treating them as raw material for extraction.
That concern increasingly links artist-rights advocates with communities opposing AI infrastructure projects using eminent domain powers to seize homes and compel residents to acept 765kV transmission lines. Both groups are confronting different manifestations of the same phenomenon: the concentration of economic gains among a relatively small number of companies while costs are dispersed across creators, workers, taxpayers, ratepayers, and local communities. One side sees its creative works absorbed into training datasets. The other sees land, water, energy resources, and public subsidies redirected toward facilities designed to power those systems.
Viewed through that lens, the protest at Shutters on the Beach becomes part of a much larger story. The controversy surrounding generative AI is no longer confined to copyright litigation or entertainment-industry politics. It now reaches questions of energy policy, infrastructure planning, local governance, environmental impact, and economic fairness.
The image of a protest banner flying above an investor summit captures that convergence perfectly. Below, financiers discussed the future of artificial intelligence and celebrated millions of dollars in new investment while licking their IPO chops in drooling anticipation of getting richer still on the backs of humanity. Above, artists and advocates posed a simpler question: if the future is being built on human creativity, shouldn’t the humans who created it have a meaningful voice in how that future is constructed?
That question is impossible to ignore. As billions continue to flow into AI companies and the infrastructure supporting them, the debate is no longer merely about technology. It is about power, consent, and who gets to decide how the benefits of human creativity and expression are captured by the Big Tech kleptocrats.
A recent report suggests that the Trump administration is considering a new executive order on artificial intelligence. On its face, that might sound like more of the same—another round of AI policy chatter promoted by David Sacks, the Silicon Valley lobbyist and billionaire investor who has been pushing a “don’t slow it down” approach.
But this time feels different.
Sacks appears to have gotten pushed out at least a bit. Don’t count the chickens just yet. But the shift in tone matters. And the timing matters even more. The order is reportedly being weighed ahead of Trump’s visit to China, where AI development has become a central axis of geopolitical competition.
That context changes the story. For the past several years, the dominant policy posture around AI has been simple: don’t slow down innovation. Because China.
That argument has been doing a lot of work. It has been used to wave away concerns about training data, to discourage state and local oversight of data center buildouts, and to greenlight massive infrastructure commitments—including dedicated nuclear power for AI campuses run by Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.
In other words: build the machine first. Deal with the consequences later.
Artists have been the raw material for that strategy.
Musicians, book authors, visual artists—these are not just inputs. They are the training ground for systems that are now capable of producing substitutive outputs that overwhelm creators and flood markets. And until now, the White House policy conversation has largely treated that massive theft as an acceptable cost of staying ahead led by David Sacks, R Street Institute and the hyperscalers.
What makes this potential executive order interesting is that it suggests a shift away from that posture. If the administration is preparing to meet with China on AI, it has an incentive to show that the United States takes control, governance, and strategic resources seriously. And in this context, creative works start to look less like “free fuel” and more like national assets.
That may matter for artists.
Because once you recognize that AI systems derive value from the signals embedded in creative works—voice, tone, style, expression—you start to see those works differently. They are not just content. They are repositories of identity and cultural value.
And they are being extracted at scale.
A more protective policy framework—whether it focuses on model review, training data standards, or provenance—creates an opening. It creates space for the idea that artists are not just upstream contributors, but stakeholders whose work underpins the entire system.
This doesn’t mean the executive order, if it comes, will solve the problem. It won’t.
But it could mark an inflection point.
If policymakers begin to treat AI not just as a technology race but as a resource competition, then the role of creators becomes harder to ignore. You can’t claim to lead in AI while simultaneously disregarding the human material that makes those systems work.
That contradiction is starting to surface. The industry allowed artists and even copyright itself to be lumped in with zoning boards as “bureaucracy” which in turn allowed David Sacks and his ilk to try to create an alternate universe where “innovation” ran wild to “beat China” while also selling chips to China out the back door.
For artists, the takeaway is simple: pay attention to the shift in tone. Policy signals often precede legal ones. What gets framed as a national priority today can become a regulatory framework tomorrow.
For the first time in a while, there are signs that the conversation may be moving—however slightly—toward recognizing the value that artists bring to the AI ecosystem.
Sacks may not be gone. Silicon Valley rarely loses outright, just look at the MLC. But even a partial shift away from the “move fast and ingest everything” playbook is meaningful.
Because for artists, the question has never been whether AI will be built.
The question is whether it will be built on you or with you.
Late last year, thieves disguised as construction workers broke into the Louvre during broad daylight, grabbed more than $100 million worth of crown jewels, and roared off on their motorbikes into the busy streets of Paris. While some of those thieves were later arrested, the jewelry they stole has yet to be recovered, and many fear those historic works of artistry have already been recut, reset, and resold.
Closer to home, but no less nefarious, is the brazen rip-off of artists enabled by irresponsible AI, whose profiteers are recutting, remixing, and reselling original works of artistry as something new. The hijacking of the world’s entire treasure-trove of music floods platforms with AI slop and dilutes the royalty pools of legitimate artists from whose music this slop is derived.
Meanwhile, those who are promoting this new business model are operating in broad daylight, too – minus the yellow safety vests. That is AI music company Suno, the brazen “smash and grab” platform whose “Make it Music” ad campaign suggests that the most personal and meaningful forms of music can now be fabricated by their unauthorized AI platform machinery trained on human artists’ work.
How significant is this activity? Publicly revealed data says Suno is used to generate 7 million tracks a day, a massive quantity that suggests a dominant market share of AI tracks. According to recent reports, Deezer “deems 85% of streams of fully AI-generated tracks [on its service] to be fraudulent,” and that such tracks include outputs from major generative models. As JP Morgan’s analysts said, Deezer’s data “should be indicative of the broader market.” Suno has yet to demonstrate persuasively that its platform does not, in practice, serve as a scalable input into streaming-fraud schemes — raising a serious concern that Suno has, in effect, become a fraud-fodder factory on an industrial scale.
In a February 2 LinkedIn post, Paul Sinclair, Suno’s Chief Music Officer, claims that his company’s platform is about “empowerment” that enables “billions of fans to create and play with music.” He argues that closed systems are “walled gardens” that deny people access to the full joy of music.
Ironically, Sinclair’s choice of analogy undermines his own argument. Ask yourself: just why are most gardens surrounded by fences or walls? To keep out rabbits, deer, raccoons and wild pigs seeking a free lunch. We cultivate, nurture and protect our gardens precisely because that makes them much more productive over the long run.
While Sinclair may be loath to admit it, AI is fundamentally different from past disruptive innovations in the music industry. The phonograph, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, downloads, streaming – all these technologies were about the reproduction and distribution of creative work. By contrast, irresponsible AI like Suno appropriates and plunders such creative work while undermining the commercial ecosystem for artists.
Think back to the days of Napster. What brought the music industry back from the ruinous abyss of unfettered digital piracy? It was the very “closed systems” that Sinclair derides as exclusionary. At least streaming platforms maintain access controls and content management systems that enable creator compensation, even if the economic outcomes for many creators remain inadequate. Should we be against Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music? What about Netflix, Disney+ and HBO, too, while we’re at it?
At its core, Sinclair’s argument is just a tired remix of the old trope that “information wants to be free.” What that really means is: “We want your music for free.”
Artists need to understand Suno’s game. They are not putting technology in the service of artists; they are putting artists in the service of their technology. Every time artists’ creations are used by the platform, those creations have just unwittingly been contributed to the creation of endless derivatives of artists’ own work, not to mention AI slop, with limited or no remuneration back to the human creators. Suno built its business on our backs, scraping the world’s cultural output without permission, then competing against the very works exploited.
It’s also important to keep in mind that using Suno to generate audio output calls into question the copyrightability of whatever Suno creates. Most countries around the world including the US Copyright Office have been clear that generative AI outputs are largely ineligible for a copyright – meaning the economic value of the Suno creation lies solely with Suno, not with the artist using it. The only ones gaining empowerment from Suno are Suno themselves.
Many in our community are embracing responsible AI as a tool for creation, and as a means for fans to explore and interact with our artistry. That’s wonderful. But it’s not the same as creating an environment where AI-generated works sourced from our music are mass distributed to dilute our royalties or, worse yet, reward those actively seeking to commit fraud. Artists need to know the difference – all AI platforms are not the same, and Suno, which is being sued for copyright infringement, is not a platform artists should trust.
Responsible AI-generated music must evolve within a framework that respects and remunerates artists, enhances human creativity rather than supplants it, and empowers fans to engage with the music they love. At the same time, AI services must preclude mass distribution of slop and prevent fraudsters from destroying the very ecosystem that has been built to reward and sustain artists and audiences alike.
All of us, including billions of music fans, share an urgent, deep and abiding interest in protecting and rewarding human genius, even as AI continues to change our industry and the world in unimaginable ways. So in 2026, even as the Louvre continues to revamp its own approach to security, we in the arts must rise to confront those who would “smash-and-grab” our creativity for their own benefit.
Together, while embracing innovation, we must work to establish more effective safeguards – both legal and technological – that better promote and protect all creative artists, our intellectual property, and the spark of human genius.
Say no to Suno. Say yes to the beauty and bounty of the gardens that feed us all.
Signed:
Ron Gubitz, Executive Director, Music Artist Coalition
Helienne Lindvall, Songwriter and President, European Composer and Songwriter Alliance
David C. Lowery, Artist and Editor The Trichordist
Tift Merritt artist, Practitioner in Residence, Duke University and Artist Rights Alliance Board Member
Blake Morgan, artist, producer, and President of ECR Music Group.
David is pointing to a quiet but serious problem hiding behind the rush to use generative AI in advertising, film, and television: copyright law protects authorship, not outputs. AI muddies or even erases authorship altogether in some cases
Under current U.S. Copyright Office guidance, works generated primarily by AI are often not registrable in the Copyright Office because they lack a human author exercising creative control. That means a brand that relies on AI to generate a commercial may not actually own exclusive rights in the finished work. If someone copies, remixes, or repurposes that ad, even in a way that damages the brand, the company may have little or no legal recourse under copyright law.
The Copyright Office guidance says:
In the Office’s view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author,” which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans. The Office’s registration policies and regulations reflect statutory and judicial guidance on this issue….If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user
David has not identified a theoretical risk. Copyright is the backbone of brand control in media. It’s what allows companies to stop misuse, dilution, parody-turned-weapon, or hostile appropriation. In the US, a copyright registration is required to protect those rights. Remove that protection, and brands are left relying on weaker tools like trademark or unfair competition law, which are narrower, slower, and often ill-suited to digital remix culture.
David’s warning extends beyond ads. Film and TV studios experimenting with AI-generated scripts, scenes, music, or visuals may be undermining their own ability to control, license, or defend those works. In trying to save money upfront, they may be giving up the legal leverage that protects their brand, reputation, and long-term value.
When White House AI Czar David Sacks tweets confidently that “there will be no federal bailout for AI” because “five major frontier model companies” will simply replace each other, he is not speaking as a neutral observer. He is speaking as a venture capitalist with overlapping financial ties to the very AI companies now engaged in the most circular investment structure Silicon Valley has engineered since the dot-com bubble—but on a scale measured not in millions or even billions, but in trillions.
Sacks is a PayPal alumnus turned political-tech kingmaker who has positioned himself at the intersection of public policy and private AI investment. His recent stint as a Special Government Employee to the federal government raised eyebrows precisely because of this dual role. Yet he now frames the AI sector as a robust ecosystem that can absorb firm-level failure without systemic consequence.
The numbers say otherwise. The diagram circulating in the X-thread exposes the real structure: mutually dependent investments tied together through cross-equity stakes, GPU pre-purchases, cloud-compute lock-ins, and stock-option-backed revenue games. So Microsoft invests in OpenAI; OpenAI pays Microsoft for cloud resources; Microsoft books the revenue and inflates its stake OpenAI. Nvidia invests in OpenAI; OpenAI buys tens of billions in Nvidia chips; Nvidia’s valuation inflates; and that valuation becomes the collateral propping up the entire sector. Oracle buys Nvidia chips; OpenAI signs a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle; Oracle books the upside. Every player’s “growth” relies on every other player’s spending.
This is not competition. It is a closed liquidity loop. And it’s a repeat of the dot-bomb “carriage” deals that contributed to the stock market crash in 2000.
And underlying all of it is the real endgame: a frantic rush to secure taxpayer-funded backstops—through federal energy deals, subsidized data-center access, CHIPS-style grants, or Department of Energy land leases—to pay for the staggering infrastructure costs required to keep this circularity spinning. The singularity may be speculative, but the push for a public subsidy to sustain it is very real.
Call it what it is: an industry searching for a government-sized safety net while insisting it doesn’t need one.
In the meantime, the circular investing game serves another purpose: it manufactures sky-high paper valuations that can be recycled into legal war chests. Those inflated asset values are now being used to bankroll litigation and lobbying campaigns aimed at rewriting copyright, fair use, and publicity law so that AI firms can keep strip-mining culture without paying for it.
The same feedback loop that props up their stock prices is funding the effort to devalue the work of every writer, musician, actor, and visual artist on the planet—and to lock that extraction in as a permanent feature of the digital economy.
The Trichordist 
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