AI Music News
Your independent source for AI music news and what each story means for music creators.
- 25 Aug
25 AugKOMCA pulled its AI music registration rules 22 days after they took effect
- KOMCA's board voted at its 8th meeting on August 25, 2026 to withdraw the amendments to its work registration rules and its trust contract terms.
- The withdrawn standard had been in force since August 3, 2026, a run of 22 days.
- Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism sent KOMCA an official letter on August 18 recommending wider public debate across the arts.
- 25 Aug
25 AugLuminate will tag AI-generated songs in CONNECT with a single label, and Billboard's charts run on that data
- Luminate announced its AI music framework on August 25, 2026, and will roll the feature out to CONNECT customers and partners later this year.
- Flagged songs and artist profiles get one label, "AI Generated", with a dedicated review process for artists and labels who think a tag is wrong.
- The framework runs on three inputs: Luminate's own identification technology, self-labeled streaming data from DSPs, and attribution data sourced directly from AI music companies.
- 25 Aug
25 AugRound Hill wants Suno's and Anthropic's model weights impounded, not just the training files
- Both Round Hill complaints ask the court to impound or destroy copies held in "training datasets, internal repositories, model weights, and server infrastructure" under 17 U.S.C. Section 503.
- The contributory infringement count against Bright Data carries the only fixed sum in either filing: 500 works at $150,000 each, or $75 million.
- Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with book authors in September 2025 committed it to destroying torrented files, not the models trained on them.
- 24 Aug
24 AugDr. Dre says he uses AI in the studio, and only people who struggle to create are scared of it
- Dr. Dre confirmed he uses AI in his production work in a New York Times interview published on August 23, 2026
- He described the people who see AI as a threat as the ones "who have trouble creating" and compared the backlash to early resistance against the drum machine
- Dre said he runs AI over finished work to hear what it does with it, which is a response check rather than generating a track from a prompt
- 24 Aug
24 AugThe AI song Bette Midler called cultural genocide is 'Celebrate Me' by IngaRose
- Bette Midler attacked an unnamed charting AI song in an Instagram post on August 21, 2026, ending it with the hashtag cultural genocide
- The track is "Celebrate Me" by IngaRose, a Suno-built act that topped the US and global iTunes charts on April 17, 2026
- IngaRose's own Instagram describes the songs as human-written lyrics with stems and arrangements refined using Suno, which is a narrower claim than fully generated
- 24 Aug
24 AugThe Philippines-Korea Copyright Forum 2026 put metadata at the centre of the AI music payment problem
- IPOPHL, South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Copyright Protection Agency held the 2026 Philippines-Korea Copyright Forum in Bonifacio Global City on August 11, 2026
- Speakers put the payment failure on rights data, arguing that inaccurate metadata attached to mass AI uploads makes performance rights and royalty claims hard to establish
- Philippines Recorded Music Rights general manager Ace Acosta named royalty hijacking, search manipulation and revenue pool diversion as the effects on human creators
- 24 Aug
24 AugSamori Coles has produced records for 30 years. Now he directs AI music videos too.
- Samori Coles spent 30 years as an audio engineer, producer, and songwriter, and still owns Lil' Drummaboy Recordings, his Philadelphia recording studio
- He started directing AI music videos, micro-dramas, and VFX work in 2024, and now works under the title generative AI director and producer
- He directed the video for "Love Notes" by Olivia B. Moore, a record that reached No. 1 on the SIQA Top 20 AI R&B Songs chart in March 2026
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- 21 Aug
21 AugApple Music will put Made With AI labels on Suno tracks later this year, if labels tag them first
- Apple told industry partners on August 20, 2026 it will add Made With AI labels to Apple Music later this year.
- The labels make visible the AI Transparency Tags Apple Music has run inside its delivery feed since March 2026.
- Record labels and distributors carry the tagging duty, and Apple Music runs no AI detection of its own for the labels.
- 21 Aug
21 AugUMG-backed Music IP Holdings licenses more than 24 AI music patents to Udio and GRAI
- Music IP Holdings licensed more than 24 AI music patents to Udio and GRAI on August 20, 2026.
- The UMG and Liquidax Capital joint venture holds 24-plus issued or allowed patents and more than 50 pending applications.
- The portfolio spans prompt moderation, watermarking, identifier tagging, authorization, licensed distribution and royalty payment.
- 20 Aug
20 AugQuantizr raises $5 million to run tour finances with AI
- Quantizr closed a $5 million seed round led by TTV Capital, an early backer of Bill.com and Greenlight.
- The platform pulls financial and deal terms out of deal memos, contracts and settlement statements and turns them into standardised data.
- Big Gigantic drummer Jeremy Salken co-founded the company with former BlackRock director Joshua Litwack and attorney Tim Nielsen.
- 20 Aug
20 AugMetric bots and 'artificial musicians' are marginalising real artists, Queen's University Belfast research warns
- Dr Katherine Pittalis at Queen's University Belfast finds musicians are being squeezed out and marginalised by automated systems.
- The research names two mechanisms: metric bots inflating likes and follows, and artificial musicians combining deepfakes with bot networks.
- Pittalis argues the UK regulatory framework is woefully lagging behind the EU and US on transparency around malicious bot use.
- 20 Aug
20 AugSony and Universal win a stream-ripping claim against Suno and lose the $9 billion expansion
- Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV issued two orders in UMG Recordings v. Suno on August 18, 2026, one granting and one denying a motion to amend.
- Sony and Universal can now pursue a DMCA Section 1201(a) claim over Suno using YT-DL and YT-DLP to pull audio off YouTube.
- The court denied the labels' bid to grow the case from 560 recordings to 61,586, keeping potential damages far below the $9 billion figure.