Once AI Music Makes Money, Who Gets It?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at how music will be licensed by AI companies — why I think it’s inevitable, how it might happen and what it might look like. Conceptually, this is a fascinating subject, because dividing money fairly among rights holders may depend on having after-the-fact control of training data created by the initial license. But which rights holders get paid, and how much?

Right now, the popular way to look at this issue is to think about what’s fair: how conceptually important songs are compared to recordings, what kind of popularity can be used as a proxy for AI training — that kind of thing. I am sorry to say, although by now it should be obvious, that none of this will matter much. Music and technology companies tend to operate by litigating, lobbying an