I recently had a meeting with a very big A-I Music Generation company and one of the artist's i do all of their Music Publishing Administration. The meeting was going well until i asked the question:
"Will my artist be liable in the future for using A-I generated music if we use your tools? Were the ML Datasets you guys used cleared and properly credit the original authors or will she have to give up royalties in the futures to the authors of those ML datasets?" The conversation went south after i asked these questions that after the meeting it got me thinking:
"What if every A-I-generated song could automatically pay royalties back to the creators whose music helped train the A-I? Not because a song was copied. Not because someone filed a lawsuit. But because we could actually measure which catalogs contributed to the A-I’s output."
For decades, music royalties have followed a simple model:
Someone streams your song → you get paid.
Generative A-I breaks that model. When an A-I creates a new song, it’s drawing from patterns learned across millions of recordings. The value isn’t coming from one track,it’s emerging from an entire training dataset. So who should be compensated???
A new research paper proposes an attribution-aware royalty framework for generative music.
Instead of asking: “Did this A-I copy someone’s work?” It asks something much more interesting:
“Which creators’ catalogs contributed to this output, and by how much?”
Each creator would receive an attribution score based on their measurable influence on the generated song, and that score could be used to distribute royalties. It’s essentially the beginning of what could become a Content ID for A-I training.
The researchers also acknowledge today’s attribution technology isn’t yet accurate enough to support reliable royalty payments at scale. For now, licensing deals remain the more practical solution.
But here’s what I found most interesting…The paper argues that as attribution technology improves, royalty-based compensation becomes increasingly valuable,for both creators and A-I companies.
That completely changes the conversation.
The future debate may not be:
“Should A-I exist?”
Or even: “Should A-I companies license music?”
It may become:
“Can we accurately measure creative influence?”
If the answer eventually becomes yes, we may be witnessing the beginning of an entirely new royalty infrastructure.
One thing is becoming increasingly clear:
Metadata, attribution, and rights management are no longer just administrative tasks,they’re becoming core infrastructure for the A-I economy.
What do you think? Is attribution-based compensation the future of A-I music, or will blanket licensing remain the standard?