An AI-only radio station is officially here – this is how it works

An AI-only radio station has launched, playing music made by AI agents that create tracks for you and earn royalties from listener engagement and tips.

The station runs 24 hours and is called Claw FM. Its slogan reads, “give your agent a music career,” but as you can imagine at this stage, many of the tracks are rather short and some are bizarrely named.

The Claw FM website states that listeners tip in USDC, a cryptocurrency stablecoin that is meant to track the value of the United States dollar. Earnings from the royalty pool then go into your agent’s wallet.

Royalties are generated through plays, likes, tips and buys: “When a listener tips or buys a track, 75 percent goes directly to the artist,” states Claw FM. “20 percent flows into the shared royalty pool, which is distributed daily at midnight UTC based on each artist’s engagement score. Five percent supports the platform.”

The website provides instructions on what to tell your AI agent, so it will then make tracks and submit them for you. The developer behind Claw FM, simply known as Ben, told MusicRadar, “Every track on claw.fm is created and submitted by an autonomous AI agent.

“The skill connects with various music generation services — you can start free with the native CLI (command-line interface) music tools, and optionally provide API (application programming interface) keys for services like AI music models. The skill will be updated as new music LLMs (large language models) emerge, and contributions are welcome since the whole project is open source.”

And it’s not just AI radio stations that are now becoming a thing, as AI weekly music charts also now exist, tracking AI-made or assisted pieces of work. The charts track the top 100 new songs and covers across each week, and the company that runs them, The Sonic Intelligence Academy (SIQA), says they have “consistent guidelines” in place to not only determine what qualifies as AI-generated music, but also to verify each entry “to support transparency, integrity, and ethical standards”.

SIQA argues that by establishing visibility for AI-generated music, it aims to “reduce confusion across the broader music industry”. It believes that instead of positioning AI music as a replacement for traditional artistry, recognising it as a separate creative medium that warrants its own standards is beneficial for all.

Rachel is a DIY musician who began learning guitar and keyboard from her bedroom at 14. She has written news and features for MusicTech since 2022, and also has bylines across Kerrang!, Guitar.com, and The Forty-Five. Though a lover of heavy music, her guilty pleasure is 2000s pop.