The music platform Tidal has set out a new policy on artificial intelligence: it will no longer pay out royalties on tracks it judges to be entirely AI-generated, but it will not remove them from the service, The Verge reported.
Not banned, just unpaid
Under the approach, fully AI-made tracks can still be uploaded and streamed, but they will earn nothing and be ineligible for direct-to-fan sales, as Music Business Worldwide reported. Tidal also plans to label such tracks so listeners can see what they are hearing. The company describes its detection rules as a "living document" that will tighten over time — eventually flagging music that is substantially, not just wholly, AI-generated — and says it will automatically strip out fraudulent uploads, such as AI tracks impersonating real artists.
Why platforms are worried
The move reflects a growing anxiety across the industry: that a deluge of cheap, machine-made music is diluting the finite pool of royalties that human artists share. The concern is less that listeners are clamoring for AI songs than that bad actors can mass-upload them to siphon payouts. The scale is striking. Tidal's rival Deezer has said that around 44% of the new tracks uploaded to its platform are now AI-generated — tens of thousands a day — even though such tracks account for only a low single-digit percentage of actual streams, as reported by TechCrunch. The gap suggests much of the AI flood exists to game the system rather than to be heard.
An industry scrambling to respond
Tidal is not alone. Deezer has rolled out its own AI-detection tool and begun tagging tracks; Apple Music has introduced labels; and the broader business is fighting on a second front in the courts, where the recording industry has sued AI music generators such as Suno and Udio over how their models were trained. Together, the steps mark an attempt to draw a line between human and machine creativity before the distinction is lost in the feed.
The open questions
Tidal's compromise is not without critics. Detecting AI music is far from an exact science, and skeptics warn that automated systems risk false positives — penalizing human artists who use AI tools lightly, or who simply make music that trips the detector. Others question the coherence of a policy that tolerates AI tracks but refuses to pay for them: if the goal is to protect the royalty pool, would a clearer rule be to keep them off the platform altogether? Tidal's bet is that demonetizing — rather than banning — removes the financial incentive to flood the service, while leaving room for the genuine, disclosed use of new tools. Whether that balance holds, as the technology keeps improving, is the question now facing every streaming service.
