How Musicians Can Get Paid for Training AI
IEEE Spectrum AI Oliver Bown
Sureel and SoundVerse are developing systems to pay musicians when their work is used to train generative AI models, with Sureel partnering with Swedish copyright agency STIM to track training data usage and set licensing fees. Sureel's software labels music files with owner instructions and tracks how AI companies use them, while SoundVerse advocates for ongoing royalties based on how much each training piece influences each AI-generated output. The success of these attribution approaches depends on solving complex technical challenges and establishing transparent policies that fairly reward creators without creating new incentives for gaming the system.
Why it matters
Musicians are accustomed to getting paid each time their creative work is used. Across vinyl/CD sales, streams, radio, cover versions, and those numerous niches like karaoke, there are agreements in place about what “use” means. Underlying this is a simple economic principle: The more something is used, the more money it makes.Generative AI has complicated the definition of use. On the one hand, you could argue that the use of a piece of musical training data happens just once, at the point of training. On the other hand, creators would be right to complain that the creative essence of their work lives on in the structure of the model, used every time the model produces an output.Now, companies like Sureel and SoundVerse are working to re-create the essential economic principle that motivates creativity in an era of AI. Such initiatives aim to turn the generative AI industry from one guilty of “the biggest act of copyright theft in history” into one that coexists harmoniously with hard
