In the AI Age, the Music Industry Needs New Metadata Standards. But Time Is Running Out (Guest Column)

In the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI, the music industry is facing urgent and profound disruptions. As AI-generated compositions flood digital platforms, mimic human artists (to varying degrees), and go viral under fictional personas, the industry finds itself at a crossroads. At the heart of the issue is a challenge that resurfaces with every technological shift: creating fair and equitable licensing models. Time and again, new (and well-funded) companies enter the market with little interest in paying music creators what they’re truly worth. 

Since the inception of the concept of copyright, there has been an underlying assumption that songs originate from human creators. This foundation underpins everything from copyright registrations to royalty distributions. But in today’s landscape, generative AI can create music with minimal or no human input, and the industry’s legacy systems are simply not equipped to handle this new reality.

When an AI-generated work appears on a streaming platform, who owns it?  Who should get paid if it racks up millions of streams or is licensed for film, TV or ads? And how is it fair for these AI-created works to siphon off streams — and revenue — that would otherwise go to human-made music?  These questions remain largely unanswered. As a result, AI music continues to enter the market with little to no accurate metadata about how it was created, who owns it or what its legal status is. 

This lack of clarity imposes a serious threat to the infrastructure that sustains the music industry economy. At a time when building a sustainable career as an artist, musician or songwriter is already more difficult than ever, this represents yet another massive challenge. PROs, DSPs, music publishers, record labels and digital distributors all depend on accurate metadata to properly allocate royalties. When a track’s origin is unclear, the system breaks down: payments go unmade, or worse, end up in the hands of bad actors gaming the system. Now multiply that by the virtually limitless volume of AI-generated music, and we’re staring down a full-blown crisis. 

Metadata is the DNA of music. It contains essential information — songwriters, performers, publishers, ISRC codes, ISWC codes — that allows works to be identified, tracked, monetized and ultimately paid on. Unfortunately, the music industry still has massive data gaps for millions of human-generated works. With the arrival of AI-generated music at a global scale, that gap is rapidly widening into a chasm. 

To future-proof the industry, we need new metadata standards that clearly indicate whether a work is human made, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated. This added layer of transparency would benefit everyone in the licensing ecosystem: publishers, labels, DSPs, broadcasters, distributors and beyond. It should also extend to the listening public, so audiences know what they’re engaging with. Implementing this could be as simple as adding a few extra few words to the label copy or credits.

A fair and equitable licensing model goes hand in hand with the new standard for metadata. It’s straightforward: the AI needs songs to train off of, and songs have tremendous value. The pushback is that large-scale licensing often comes with challenges in identifying all the rights holders — multiple songwriters and publishers and hard-to-trace sound recording owners can make the process complex. But AI companies that are creating the most powerful learning technology ever known to man should be able to keep track of what songs are being used to train their models. Furthermore, it’s never been easier to find out who owns the rights to a song.  The music industry has worked tremendously hard on transparency over the years, driven largely by the shift from physical formats to a digital streaming ecosystem and the vast amounts of data that come with it.

AI is moving at a breakneck speed, and the gap between attribution and automation is widening by the day. If we fail to act now, we risk losing the ability to properly document, license and protect music at scale. Once metadata is lost — or never created in the first place — it becomes exponentially harder, if not impossible, to recover. The longer we wait to implement clear standards and guardrails, the more vulnerable human creators become to exploitation and erasure. The time to close the gap is now — before attribution becomes a relic of the past.

Frank Handy is the national chair and Los Angeles chapter president of the Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) and a seasoned music executive with two decades of experience in publishing, royalties, and operations. Currently vice president and head of operations & administration at Position Music, he has overseen global catalogs and worked with artists including The Weeknd, Lorde, and Diplo.