2025 is ending with a flurry of AI-music licensing deals, rewarding the industry’s focused drive for permission, payment and transparency from GenAI firms.
However, the year is also ending with a growing chorus of anger from musicians about specific AI-music projects that they feel are overly inspired by their work, voices and likenesses.
We reported this week on the anger from Jorja Smith’s label FAMM about breakout AI-assisted hit ‘I Run’, and earlier this year on rock band Holding Absence’s fury at seeing a project called Bleeding Verse that seemed heavily influenced by them get more Spotify listeners.
July saw a ‘new’ track from country artist Blaze Foley – who died in 1989 – revealed to be the work of an “AI schlock bot”, and in October still-alive US band Here We Go Magic suffered a similar issue, with frontman Luke Temple learning about it when he woke up to a blitz of Instagram DMs. Now this week, there are two more controversies to add to the list.
One concerns Breaking Rust, the country-music AI project that made a splash in Billboard and Spotify charts in November. Human country artist Blanco Brown has now released a cover version of the ‘Walk My Walk’ hit, partly to highlight the fact that Breaking Rust appears to mimic his sound.
MBW also reported on the protest of another artist, Bryan Elijah Smith, who filed a rights claim that led to a brief removal of ‘Walk My Walk’ from Spotify.
He accused Breaking Rust and similar projects of “deceiving the public and using my likeness and artistic identity to generate streams that cut into the same limited revenue pool independent musicians and songwriters rely on to survive”.
This week’s second row focuses on human band Architects, who recently released a new track called ‘Ashesof the Kingdom’. Except – and you’ll have seen this coming – they didn’t: it was an obviously-AI-generated song that somehow appeared on their Spotify profile. Louder reported that the real band’s fan community mobilised to get it taken down.
That’s one encouraging thing: human fans defending human artists. But this week’s two controversies reflect two different challenges.
AI tracks appearing on a human artist’s profile calls for some straight Paddington-grade hard stares at the DSPs and distributors. This keeps happening; why does it keep happening; what are you doing to stop it happening in 2026?
AI projects like Breaking Rust and Bleeding Verse that human musicians feel are too similar to their own work… that’s more difficult. Historically, the music industry has hardly been averse from signing a bunch of artists who sound, look and have songs like the latest breakout star. Is it really so different if the fast-follows are AI-generated?
Well, maybe it is. Or at least more worrying for the future health of the music industry. Partly because the artists complaining about this aren’t the superstars: they’re more likely to be lower down the industry pyramid – the ‘middle class’ of artists scrapping to built sustainable careers amid all the challenges around streaming and touring. It’s understandable why they feel AI clones as a proper kick in the teeth.
It all comes back to the seemingly-positive story of those AI-licensing deals. In theory, it means that if AI projects are being created using systems trained on these artists, they’ll earn royalties from them. But in practice, we don’t yet know how these deals will work for the likes of Holding Absence, Blanco Brown and Bryan Elijah Smith, Jorja Smith and more.
What and how will they earn from these deals? If they’re independent, will they be at a disadvantage? And will whatever they earn from attributed AI royalties make up for whatever they might lose in the competition with GenAI projects that hew closely to their style?
All of which is a warning to the music industry not to be so chuffed with finally signing some licensing deals that it ignores the growing distress and anger in some parts of its community of artists and songwriters.
The deals are just the start of a process that needs to include a narrative of hope and encouragement for the musicians whose work made these agreements possible.
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