Everyone is freaking out over how disruptive AI has been. Musicians and the music industry are no exception. AI can now generate a "passable" background cue in a few seconds. And it can score a corporate video if you ask it; a podcast intro; produce royalty-free library music at a scale and volume no human could ever match. Musicians relying on the income driven through music are worried how this will affect their future royalties.

AI is disrupting the creative industry and the sync market in one, small slice. At the same time, it is creating opportunities for enterprising musicians learning new skills. Are you in the sync market and competing on speed, volume, and utility? You may have a hard time with what AI is about to unleash. On the other hand, you will thrive if you compete using something AI cannot manufacture: human emotion through sound, storytelling, and, of course, music which is legally clear to license.

Our brief this week is taking a look at both sides of the picture playing out now. Where AI is winning the race and where it isn’t. We’ll also get into how the legal landscape is evolving around these new tools and how independent artists like yourself should position themselves in this fast changing market. Let’s get into it.

The scale of AI-generated music entering the market will blow your mind. Deezer, the French streaming platform, tracked 10,000 fully AI-generated songs being uploaded daily in January 2025. The platform has been the most transparent about AI content being uploaded than all the other platforms. The number increased to 50,000 per day by November of 2025 and represented 34% of ALL MUSIC UPLOADED to the platform.

Yes, that is a high number, but there is another figure which isn’t mentioned as often. Of those tracks being uploaded, they only represent 0.5% of Deezer’s total streams. And 70% of those streams (70% of that 0.5%) are fraudulent. In other words, the streams are generated by bots, not anyone making a deliberate listening choice.

So this is where we are: the AI generated music supply is high and the demand is low. Supply and demand, baby. These platforms are being filled with content non-stop. And no one is making a deliberate choice to listen to it. 

What is the honest picture happening in the music market then? We need to look at the different tiers in the industry to try and find our answer. None of these tiers are the same, and AI is having a different impact across all of them.

Where is AI-generated music having the most impact? In content formats focused on speed, cost, and volume. Basically, your run of the mill basic music production work that is made more for efficiency than emotion. This includes background music for YouTube videos and other social media content, corporate presentations, and low budget indie productions. Anyone who needs a cheap bed of sound rather than a song. There have been a few AI-focused sync platforms and libraries built to serve this market too. And it works. Businesses who need music fast and cheap aren’t worried about emotion and storytelling through sound in the first place. Plus, they won’t need to clear the rights from a human composer (what a weird sentence to write).

Anyway, this is the tier library composers and production music makers will face the most direct competition. Fast, cheap, and easy to reproduce without a need to worry about the underlying rights of the song.  

What about the other side of the scale? This is where you will find higher end music production. And this is where AI-generated music is having a hard time breaking into. (Hans Zimmer can breathe easy, he isn’t being replaced). There are no known examples of AI-generated music in any major network television, film, or national advertising campaigns. At least yet.

If you find yourself in any tech circles, you will have inevitably read someone talking about taste. And here is where taste matters. A lot. And let’s go further. It is also backed by legal reasons. As of now, at least under U.S. copyright law, works created entirely by artificial intelligence are not eligible for copyright protection. The U.S. Copyright Office has been unambiguous on this point: only works with meaningful human authorship qualify for copyright. Without ownership there is no license to grant, which means no one working on a major piece of media is going to waste their time using a song they can’t legally clear.

Higher-stakes opportunities mean everyone will be on point. Even if a music supervisor were to fall in love with a piece of AI-generated music, if they can’t legally use it, they aren’t going to bother. NEXT!

So if a music supervisor can’t use an AI-generated piece of music because no one legally owns it, then who owns the music? Turns out, the Copyright Boards’s position is that copyright protection requires “sufficient human authorship”. In other words, you have to write the music, not prompt it. The copyright question is still a legal gray area the courts are only beginning to work through.

As of now, if you type a prompt into Suno or Udio, and add nothing else, the output cannot be copyrighted. Suno also prohibits anyone from registering their output with a PRO. Non ownership means the track is not able to license (cue sad trombone for the prompters).

Instead, treat AI as an instrument or production assistant. You should do the creative work; create your own melody, your own lyrics, and all other arrangements. Make your creations your own, and bring AI in to smooth out any rough edges. Or use it for back office work while you are creating.

The AI music industry spent 2024 fighting the major labels in court. By 2025, it started cutting deals with them. That shift is significant and worth paying attention to.

At the start of 2024 it seemed like the Napster wars had re-ignited with the major labels fighting the platforms in court. By 2025, they were all cutting deals together. What is going on here?

Udio, which had been sued by Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music in the summer of 2024, settled with Universal and Warner by late 2025. As part of its deal with Universal, Udio agreed to pivot away from generating new songs from unlicensed training data and toward becoming a licensed remixing and fan engagement platform. (Interesting). Spotify has also cut AI licensing deals with Sony, Universal, and Warner. ElevenLabs, which launched its AI music tool Eleven Music in August 2025, struck deals with publisher Kobalt and indie licensing agency Merlin with the notable structure that royalties from its licensed tier would be split equally between publishers and recording rights holders.

The majors aren’t trying to kill AI music and are instead placing their infrastructure between AI and revenue. This is a benefit for major label artists, but what about independents? The Council of Music Makers, a U.K. organization, is direct with their concern and are calling for an industry-wide standard requiring consent, full creator control, and compensation for any artist whose music is used to trian an AI model. They want an opt-in for all artists.

Above I mentioned using AI to do your admin work while you are busy creating your music and this is where I will write about this with more specificity. In fact, AI use can be a great asset for music producers knowing how to use it for their own advantage.

There are over 150,000 songs being uploaded to streaming platforms everyday, making the music supervisors job a pressure cooker. The manual process of sifting through catalogs, checking metadata, and confirming rights clearance is not possible at the scale music production demands. AI-powered platforms are stepping in to solve this problem by cleaning metadata, registering songs, and keeping catalog metadata clean.

AI-driven sync tools can now analyze a song's characteristics — mood, tempo, genre, instrumentation, emotional tone — in seconds, enabling far smarter search and recommendation for supervisors. Platforms like Bridge Audio, Alloy Music, and Synchtank are using AI to improve rights tracking and licensing transparency. Songtradr, Ringo, and MatchTune are automating parts of the licensing process itself — predicting costs, suggesting deals, and reducing the friction of negotiation.

For a human artist, this is good news. If your catalog is properly tagged, registered, and metadata-complete, now you can create music without worrying about that stuff. AI discovery tools will find you faster, surface you more accurately for the right briefs, and flag your tracks to supervisors who might never have scrolled to your page manually. Music supervisors are busy; if you don’t have your admin together, they will skip over y0ur music. AI helps you prepare your catalog for licensing glory.

As I noted above, the sync market is splintering into a two-track market. The first track is the commodity market and is built around volume and efficiency. This is all the music content made for pennies/tokens and are meant for the media creators who need sound more than they need a song. And this is where AI will dominate. Low fees, endless competition, zero differentiation. Sounds terrible. But it’s what is happening in the market. If this is where you compete now, you have your work cut out for you. 

The second track is the premium or prestige market. This is where you will find emotion built into every cue, storytelling through motifs and themes, and, of course, legally clearable music (what joy). Music supervisors and media creators want this music based on creative decisions, not functional. This is premium film and television or a national advertising campaign built with cultural ambition. (Or both). Music supervisors pick up the phone to call a music publisher they trust, where they want a piece of music with a backstory. This is where a song can make a scene land so hard people will be writing about it for years. AI can’t compete here yet. Maybe it will. But not until some legal hurdles have been changed.

The practical implication for independent artists: You should reconsider your career choices if you've been building a library of generic, mid-tempo background music and calling it a sync strategy. You aren’t going to win. The artists who will win in the AI era are those who build musical worlds around storytelling and emotion. 

DON’T PANIC!

That isn’t a strategy and panicking is a waste of time at this point. What you should do is double-down on making the music you create all your own. Become a great writer and composer. Work on your skills; put your musical voice into the what you create. At the same time, use AI to build an admin infrastructure around your music production business to make it easy to license your music.

Lean into your human specificity. Music supervisors want a piece of music that fits emotionally with a scene and story being told. Lean into your talent and skills and compose music you are proud of making and want to share. People will hear it and want to listen to it even more.

Get your catalog infrastructure right. Didn’t I explain this in the last brief? Go read it and follow through. Register every song with your PRO and the MLC. Make sure your ISRC codes are assigned and your metadata is complete, accurate, and specific. Have split sheets signed for every collaboration. Clean rights and fast clearance are your currency in the AI-assisted sync marketplace that is already here.

Build sync-ready versions of your tracks. Instrumentals, stems, alternate mixes, and TV-safe edits make your music more useful to supervisors and more placeable across different contexts. 

Tell the story behind the music. Does your music have a story? Do you have a backstory? Tell it. Tell them both. Music supervisors want to know the story of the music they are listening to. This is a selling point for your music production business so use it. Have a camera? Document behind the scenes of certain pieces of music.  Document your creative process. Talk about the experiences that shaped your sound. The narrative of YOU is part of what you're licensing.

Is AI coming for the sync market? No. It’s been here for a while. And its threat for creation is in the commodity market. The opportunities are at the top of the market in the premium areas. Should you worry? Only if you want to. Or if you don’t do anything about it and keep churning out sound banks of generic music. AI will do that 100x’s faster than you ever will. Focus on creating music with a story. Make up the story if you have to. People love a good yarn and your music should have one. The sync music market will always need emotional music to sell. You should be the one selling it.

Need help finding background music that boosts engagement? 🎧 Explore our licensing catalog or work with Playbutton Media to get custom-curated music tailored to your content goals.