Analysis ·
Music and AI: the industry has settled licensing. What about authorship?
Original title, in French: “Musique et IA : l'industrie a réglé la licence. Et l'autorat ?”
- Publication
- Journal du Net (France)
- Author
- Elodie Aishwarya Remoissenet
- Published on
- 21 September 2026 · read in the page structured data
Summary
The article analyses the wave of commercial agreements signed in September 2026 between the music industry and AI generators: Believe and TuneCore with Suno, then Universal Music Group with ElevenLabs, joining Warner Music Group and BMG. These contracts govern content licensing, while collective management organisations such as Sacem, Buma-Stemra and EJI are adopting tools to detect AI-generated content, including Deezer's, to decide on royalty payments. The author stresses that neither provenance labels nor detectors can establish the actual share of human creation in a work, citing the example of the Korea Music Copyright Association, which tried and then abandoned a verification rule based on prompt logs. A study by KTH Stockholm shows a significant error rate in commercial detectors.
Summary based on the full text of the article.
Read the article on Journal du Net →Figures cited
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99.8 %
Announced accuracy of the Deezer detector
Deezer detection tool, adopted by Sacem, Buma-Stemra, EJI
« celui de Deezer, qui annonce 99,8 % de précision et 13,4 millions de titres signalés en 2025 »
Source: Deezer newsroom
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13,400,000 tracks
Tracks flagged by the Deezer detector in 2025
2025
« celui de Deezer, qui annonce 99,8 % de précision et 13,4 millions de titres signalés en 2025 »
Source: Deezer newsroom
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7 out of 150
Error rate of the commercial detector on human recordings
KTH Stockholm study, TISMIR 2026
« sept enregistrements humains sur cent cinquante classés comme générés par un détecteur commercial, contre une précision annoncée de 98,5 % »
Source: The AI Music Arms Race, TISMIR, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
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80 %
Concentration of listening on the top percentile of tracks
United Kingdom, 2016-2020
« le premier centile des titres représentait 75 à 80 % des écoutes au Royaume-Uni entre 2016 et 2020 »
Source: Intellectual Property Office, Music Creators' Earnings in the Digital Era
Classification
- Country
- France, United States, United Kingdom, South Korea, Australia
- Company size
- Large companies
- Industries
- Media, communications, marketing
- Companies
- TuneCore (deploys AI), ElevenLabs (supplier), KOMCA (deploys AI), Deezer (supplier), Suno (supplier), Believe (deploys AI), Sacem (deploys AI), BMG (deploys AI), ARIA (cited), Universal Music Group (deploys AI), Buma-Stemra (deploys AI), OpenAI (cited), Warner Music Group (deploys AI), EJI (deploys AI)
- Keywords
- generative AI music, copyright, music licensing, generated content detection, royalties, collective management organisations
Entry written by Marsanne Studio from the cited article, with the help of an AI model (claude-sonnet-5). The rights to the article and its illustrations belong to Journal du Net and its author. Entry translated from French by Claude Sonnet 5.5.