Hello and welcome to The Human Signal with me, Laura Sheeran. Today we are looking at part six of my eleven-part series, AIWTF?, which looks at AI in the music industry right now—what’s happening in the digital music ecosystem, the good things, the bad things, the complicated things, and the bits that make no sense at all. We’re looking at all of it.
In this episode, I’m trying to make sense of what happens when the copyright system we’ve relied on for decades no longer fits the reality we’re in. I talk through the foundations of copyright—authorship, ownership, original expression—and how all of that starts to break down when music is generated by AI.
I also reflect on what this might mean structurally for the music industry. It feels like we’re moving toward a split between two systems that don’t align—one human, one AI—and I’m trying to understand what that could look like, and where it leaves artists.
Full Episode Description
Today’s episode is focusing largely on copyright law, the copyright law as it currently exists today—the law that we as creators have depended on to defend our rights, to protect our work, and to make sure that we can get paid and earn from the work that we do.
Since AI music has been flooding the industry to the degree that it has, the limitations of copyright law have been becoming more and more evident, and it is clear that the current model that exists to protect artists and musicians is no longer sufficient or fit for purpose, and radical change needs to happen.
The previous episode, I talked a lot about fair use, which I would recommend if you didn’t listen to that episode, or if you don’t know much about fair use, to go back and listen to episode #50, because it gives the full picture and the context for how AI music is able to thrive to the degree that it has. There are complications with the fair use law as well, which we go into in the last episode.
If you want to go and listen from the beginning of this series, AIWTF?, the podcast episode number to go to is #46.
This series is for people who, like me, are trying to find their way through a muddy, murky haze which is very uncertain and very unclear as to how one might want to release music in the immediate future, considering the rapid change happening all around us and how unstable the infrastructure we’ve known and depended on feels right now.
There are a lot of ethical considerations with AI. There are a lot of people who are very torn creatively in relation to AI. I know that there are artists using AI in creative ways. But there are still very complicated webs of uncertainty and potential vulnerability that you can fall into by not understanding the underlying rules, regulations, and systems that are supporting the AI music industry.
There’s a lot of potential liability, and potential loss of autonomy and rights. It’s a minefield.
Quick disclaimer: I’m just a normal person. I am an independent artist. I am not a legal expert, not an industry expert, not an AI expert. I’m just an artist trying to do the right thing by my work, by my music, and to protect myself from potential exploitation.
I’ve always released my music as ethically as I can, so that’s the position I’m coming from.
So, this is part six: human copyright law. The law as we know it was not set up to deal with any of these AI complications. The original copyright was built on human authorship, original expression, and clear ownership. But now, generative AI has exploded that whole concept wide open.
AI music - who is the author? Is it the AI model? Is it the prompter? Or is it the (potentially) hundreds or thousands of writers who’s stolen work makes up the training data which spits out some kind of Frankenstein-esque amalgam on the other side of a generate button.. With AI music specifically, who counts as an artist? What does being an artist mean?
These are questions that must be asked and they are things we haven’t worked out or decided on collectively yet. At the moment, everyone is just going with what makes sense to them and what suits their own interests. There’s no culturally agreed upon set of rules.
If copyright depends on original expression, then how can that apply if something like a song has been generated from potentially millions of other works? Where does ownership begin and end?
If I own my music and it gets trained into an AI, and then I hear something in an AI-generated track that clearly resembles something I created, can I claim that? Or does my ownership end at the boundary of my original song?
How does this tie in with sampling? Sampling has been around for decades, with its own rules. I don’t know how this compares. That’s something I want to look into further (I really wish I was educated in law. It’s kind of a fantasy of mine to go and get a law degree!)
Back to the point. I think what needs to be worked out first is whether AI music counts as fair use. That will dictate everything. Because since AI outputs are being commercially distributed, charting, generating revenue, and organisations such as AIMPRO positioning themselves to start collecting royalties for AI music, then fair use becomes very hard to argue. If outputs are directly competing in the market, the fair use argument starts to fall apart.
What’s happening right now is that outputs are trying to be legitimised before the inputs have been legally resolved. I can’t see a logical pathway forward because there’s no agreed ethical code, and the law hasn’t adapted.
One thing feels certain: the music industry as we’ve known it is gone. Not that it will disappear entirely, but it will have to bend with this tide, or it will break. Maybe this is a breaking point, where the split starts to happened.
What we’re seeing is a traditional rights system, built over a century, now colliding with a new AI-native system emerging alongside it. I can’t see how these two systems can merge—they are fundamentally misaligned. It feels more likely they will split and move in different directions. We could be witnessing the great music industry split of 2026!
Ideally, they would coexist in a balanced way. But more realistically, they may compete for dominance. Based on what platforms are prioritising and how AI content is being pushed, it’s not hard to see which direction things are heading in the short term.
Looking at platforms like Deezer, if AI uploads continue growing at the current rate, they will exceed 50% of new uploads very soon. That would make AI the dominant presence in new music being uploaded.
From my own conversations with artists, many are choosing to step away from these platforms and return to Bandcamp, vinyl, or other physical formats. Of course that’s all anecdotal, but from where I’m standing, it’s clear that platforms are becoming less hospitable to human artists, while AI presence continues to rise. We see this reflected in the bilboard charts where AI’s are frequently landing number one spots and taking these places away from genuine human artists who have committed their lives to their craft.
If there really is a split beginning to develop between the human system and the AI system, it seems clear which one is positioned to dominate in the short term.
If you enjoyed this podcast please share it with a friend or consider leaving a comment or review, it really helps me out. You can also support me and my work by becoming a €5 member on Substack and Patreon. And lastly, you can still find me on YouTube / Instagram as @the_persona_project__ & @laurasheeran_ieThat’s all for now. Thanks for being here, and remember: Put humans first. Don’t feed the machines.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit laurasheeran.substack.com/subscribe