By Gust Moons of Moon Society
I talked about this in my latest Youtube video. A friend of mine made a video explaining that he uses generative AI in his music because it’s "inevitable" — the next step in the evolution of music.
The fact that he uses AI isn’t even what bothered me the most. It was that argument. I keep hearing the same thing: AI music is coming whether we like it or not, so we might as well get on board.
I don’t buy that at all. Honestly, it’s a very convenient opinion to have when AI is saving you time or making you money. If you call it inevitable, you never have to properly defend it. But calling something inevitable doesn’t make it good, and it doesn’t mean we have to accept it.
This isn’t evolution
Saying AI is the evolution of music is like saying the comet that killed the dinosaurs was part of their evolution. It wasn’t. It was their extinction.
If Suno, Udio, and every similar platform shut down tomorrow, what would actually happen? We wouldn’t lose music. Artists would keep writing, producing and releasing songs. People just wouldn’t be able to generate 20 or 50 finished tracks in a day anymore.
Deezer says it now receives roughly 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day, accounting for more than half of new deliveries at peak times in June 2026. No audience is asking for that much AI music.
People talk about these companies like they’re unstoppable. They aren’t. They are companies running websites and servers, and we can decide what role they’re allowed to play in this industry.
There’s also a huge difference between technology that helps someone make music and technology that makes the music for them. A synthesizer still needs a musician. A DAW still needs a producer. If a tool writes, performs and produces the entire track from a prompt, it isn’t helping the artist. It is doing the artist’s job.
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The artist is already disappearing
I work across artist management, labels, marketing and music content. Over the past year, I’ve watched respected labels release more tracks from brand-new profiles with no biography, no social media and no visible history anywhere online.
I’m not going to name labels, and I can’t prove that every empty profile is AI-generated. But that’s the problem. We’ve reached a point where I can look at a legitimate label release and wonder whether the artist even exists.
When artists hide their own use of generative AI, they make this worse. Once people discover that one vocal, lyric or production was generated, they start questioning everything else that artist has released. You aren’t just saving yourself some work. You’re making people doubt how much of your work is actually yours.
At the absolute minimum, fully AI-generated music should be clearly labelled. Listeners shouldn’t have to investigate an artist profile to find out whether a person made the song.
Why should AI music earn royalties?
Everything I own has been paid for by music. My rent, my food and my career have all come from working in this industry. That’s why the royalty side matters so much to me.
Royalties compensate the people and companies that created, performed, recorded, published and invested in music. If the writing, production and vocal were all generated by a machine, why on earth should that track earn the same royalties as something people actually made? Typing a prompt and paying for a subscription doesn’t make you the songwriter, vocalist, and producer.
The law is still catching up, but the U.S. Copyright Office has said that purely AI-generated material isn’t protected by copyright, that prompts alone aren’t enough and that protection depends on meaningful human creative contribution.
My opinion is simple: fully AI-generated tracks shouldn’t earn royalties. Not fewer royalties. None. If a human genuinely wrote, performed or produced the music and used AI as one small part of the process, that’s a different conversation. But a finished song generated from a prompt should not pull money from the same royalty pool as human artists.
+Read more: "Who Owns a Song No One Wrote?"
The people using AI may be replacing themselves
Mark my words: if this continues, a streaming platform will eventually let you generate whatever you want to hear on the spot.
You’ll type, “Give me a dark deep-house track with a female vocal for a late-night drive,” and the platform will make one for you. At that point, why would it need artists at all? Why pay a label, producer, vocalist or songwriter when it owns the model and the subscription?
The people making money from AI songs right now think they’re ahead of everyone else. But they may just be helping build the system that replaces them too. They’re teaching listeners that it doesn’t matter who made a song—or whether anybody made it at all. Once that becomes normal, the AI company is the only one that really wins.
We can still choose a different future
I’m not against AI as a whole. I use it for practical things all the time. Using AI to help with a boring task is not the same as generating an entire song, uploading it under an artist name and pretending you made it.
Fully generated music should be labelled. It shouldn’t be eligible for the same royalty pools, charts or recommendation systems as human-made music. If somebody deliberately passes AI-generated work off as human, there should be actual consequences.
People act as if regulating these companies is impossible. It isn’t. They depend on servers, distributors, streaming platforms and laws. All of those things can change.
Maybe we’re already late. There are already millions of AI tracks on streaming platforms. But I still have faith in the industry that gave me everything I have.
We need to stop pretending that giving up is progress. A future where artists use new technology can still be a future for music. A future where the artist is no longer needed is something else entirely.
If that’s where we’re going, call it what it is. It isn’t the evolution of music. It’s the end.
Gust Moons is a Belgian artist manager, music marketer and content creator. He has worked across various labels, brands and digital music media, and creates videos about new music and online music culture.
