All the latest in AI ‘music’

Today I’m talking with Harvey Mason Jr., who is CEO of the Recording Academy — that’s the outfit that puts on the Grammy Awards. I last talked to Harvey in 2024, when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but still not exactly clear how that would happen.

Well, it’s been 18 months since that conversation, and you’re going to hear Harvey say that AI is now “omnipresent” in music production. And Harvey knows what he’s talking about — he is himself a legendary producer who’s worked with everyone from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé. Harvey has said that every session he’s been in recently has had AI in it, and I really wanted to know what that meant — what kinds of tools are musicians using, in what way, and what kind of music is it making for us? Is it any good?

There’s this alarming trend in the Suno subreddit. People aren’t just prompting AI songs; they’re sitting around listening almost exclusively to their own slop. And in some cases, they proudly proclaim that they don’t listen to music on traditional streaming platforms anymore — it’s just AI all day.

I wanted to understand why users were consuming their own AI content over real artists’ music. So I reached out to well over a dozen people who have posted in r/SunoAI about primarily listening to their own slop, but nobody was willing to talk to me. Nobody seemed to want to go on record and explain why they preferred the hollow, polished-to-death output of Suno to the work of musicians or songwriters who had spent a lifetime honing their craft.

AI covers and remixes of songs are already a blight on the internet. Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are awash in flat reggae versions of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” dinky country renditions of The Weeknd, and monotonous Motown reimaginings of AC/DC. Now, a new tool from Spotify will make them even easier to generate and share.

Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) signed a licensing deal that will allow users to generate remixes and covers from UMG’s catalog. How exactly it will work, beyond being “powered by generative AI technology,” or how much it will cost, is unclear. They’re positioning this as a premium subscription add-on service for superfans. According to UMG’s CEO Sir Lucian Grainge, it’s supposed to “deepen fan relationships.”

I’m not sure anyone was really asking for an AI guitar pedal. But it was inevitable that someone would build one. One of the first to take the plunge is Polyend, a well-respected music gear maker with a reputation for building niche, idiosyncratic devices. The company has built grooveboxes around old-school trackers and a multi-effect pedal that you can step sequence. So there was at least some hope that if anyone could do an AI effect pedal right, it would be Polyend.

Polyend’s Endless is a $299 programmable guitar pedal running an ARM processor. It’s paired with Playground, a number of interconnected AI agents that turn any text prompt into a functioning guitar effect. If you have an idea, you don’t have to hope that someone’s already built that pedal; you can simply prompt it. Maybe there’s a specific combination of effects that you’ve always wanted, but no company sells it because there’s no demand for a combination ring modulator / auto-wah. I’m not convinced this is what guitarists are yearning for, but it’s a well-intentioned first attempt to marry an effect pedal to an LLM.

Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) just announced a licensing deal that will allow users to prompt the creation of AI-generated remixes and covers for streaming songs. The tool will be a paid add-on for Premium subscribers. Artists will be able to opt out of the program, but those who do participate will collect royalties on these AI remixes.

In October of last year, Spotify announced that it was working with UMG, as well as other major labels, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Merlin, and Believe, to create “responsible AI products.” At the time, it was unclear exactly what that meant. But this appears to be the first product of that partnership.

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The use of generative AI in pop music started almost as a gimmick. There was a sense of experimentalism to 2018’s I AM AI by Taryn Southern and 2019’s Proto by Holly Herndon, albums that were created with significant assistance from AI. Others got in on the action too, exploring the outer limits of tools like Google’s Magenta and even training their own models. But things quickly changed with the launch of Suno in December of 2023 and Udio in April of 2024.

Spotify is launching a new verification program to combat spam, fakes, and AI. Some artists will now have a “Verified by Spotify” badge and a green checkmark on their profile, indicating that the company has confirmed a real person is behind the music and the profile. At least at launch, Spotify says that AI personas or profiles that primarily upload AI-generated music are not eligible for the verification program. It did leave the door open to the possibility in the future, though, saying, “the concept of artist authenticity is complex and quickly evolving.”

Not just anyone can be verified, however. Spotify says that there must be “consistent listener activity and engagement over time,” suggesting that if you can’t cross the threshold for royalty payments, Spotify might not bother to verify your artist page. To verify acts the company isn’t asking people to send in photos of their driver’s licenses. Instead, it’s looking for activity both on and off its platform, including social media activity, merch sales, and concert dates.

Deezer says it receives nearly 75,000 AI-generated song submissions to its music streaming platform each day, accounting for about 44 percent of all daily uploads, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Despite the increase in “fraudulent” uploads, Deezer says the consumption of AI songs makes up around 1 to 3 percent of total streams, as the platform continues to remove AI-generated music from its recommendation algorithm.

Deezer positions the tool as setting an “industry standard,” adding that the platform is currently the “only” music streaming service tagging AI-generated tracks. The service also demonetizes AI-generated songs and has stopped storing high-resolution versions of them. “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon and as daily deliveries keep increasing, we hope the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artist’s rights and promote transparency for fans,” Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier writes in the blog post.

AI music platform Suno’s policy is that it does not permit the use of copyrighted material. You can upload your own tracks to remix or set your original lyrics to AI-generated music. But, it’s supposed to recognize and stop you from using other people’s songs and lyrics. Now, no system is perfect, but it turns out that Suno’s copyright filters are incredibly easy to fool.

With minimal effort and some free software, Suno will spit out AI-generated imitations of popular songs like Beyoncé‘s “Freedom,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” that are alarmingly close to the original. Most people will likely be able to tell the difference, but some could be mistaken for alternate takes or B-sides at a casual listen. What’s more, it’s possible someone could monetize these uncanny valley covers by exporting them and uploading them to streaming services. Suno declined to comment for this story.

In January, folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered several songs on her Spotify profile that did not belong there. They were songs that she had recorded, but she’d never uploaded them to Spotify, and something was off about the vocals.

She quickly surmised that someone had pulled performances of the songs she posted to YouTube, created AI covers, and uploaded them to streaming platforms under her name. I ran one of the songs, “Four Marys”, through two different AI detectors, and it seemed to support her suspicions with both saying it was probably AI-generated.

Suno just released one of its biggest updates yet with v5.5 of its AI music model. Where previous updates focused mostly on improving fidelity and creating more natural vocals, v5.5 is about giving users more control. It includes three new features: Voices, My Taste, and Custom Models.

In the release notes, Suno says that Voices is its most requested feature. It lets users train the vocal model on their own voice. They can upload clean accapellas, finished tracks with backing music, or just sing directly into the mic on their phone or laptop. The cleaner and higher quality the recording, the less data is required. And to prevent someone from simply stealing another person’s voice, Suno requires the user to also speak a verification phrase. Though, this might be possible to fool with existing AI models of celebrity voices.

Apple is asking artists and record labels on its music streaming platform to voluntarily label songs that were made using AI. The new “Transparency Tags” metadata system for Apple Music was announced in a newsletter to industry partners yesterday, according to Music Business Worldwide, and covers four categories, including track, composition, artwork, and music videos.

The track tag should be applied when “a material portion of a sound recording” has been generated by AI tools, while the composition tag covers other AI-generated compositional elements, such as song lyrics. The artwork tag applies to static or moving graphics, but only at the album level. For all other AI-generated visual content — whether standalone or bundled with albums — the music video tag should be applied. Multiple transparency tags can be used simultaneously for works that require more than one of these disclosures.

ProducerAI, an AI-powered music-making platform, is joining Google. As part of the deal, Google will fold ProducerAI under the Labs umbrella and power the tool with a preview version of its new Lyria 3 music-making AI model.

ProducerAI is a music-making platform that allows users to work with an AI agent to generate sounds, workshop lyrics, remix songs, and even create new instruments based on a prompt. The platform launched in July 2025 as a successor to the AI music-making tool Riffusion, and initially used the startup’s own AI model to help you generate songs and tweak existing ones. Seth Forsgren, the cofounder and CEO of ProducerAI, tells The Verge the team is “just scratching the surface of what these models are going to be able to do once we harness everything that Google brings to the table.”

Google has given Gemini the ability to spit out AI-generated music, courtesy of DeepMind’s latest audio model. Beta access to Lyria 3 is rolling out in the Gemini app, enabling users to generate 30-second tracks based on text, images, and videos, without having to leave the chatbot window.

The new music-making tool is available globally starting today in English, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese, with plans to expand in the future. Access is limited to Gemini app users who are 18 years or older.

The music streaming service Deezer is giving other companies access to its AI song-detecting tool. The tool, which identifies, tags, and excludes AI-generated music from algorithmic recommendations, is now available for businesses to purchase and use, according to an announcement on Wednesday.

Deezer launched its AI music detection tool last year as part of efforts to “prevent fraudulent actors from stealing royalties from real artists through mass produced AI-generated music.” The company says it has used the tool to identify and tag more than 13.4 million AI songs in 2025, even as the flood of AI-generated tracks continues to grow. Deezer claims its tool can detect AI songs with a 99.8 percent accuracy rate.

ElevenLabs has released an album of AI-generated songs in its latest attempt to separate itself from the ethical concerns surrounding AI music. The Eleven Album aims to showcase “how artists can use AI to expand their creative range while maintaining full authorship and commercial rights,” according to ElevenLabs.

ElevenLabs is using the album to market its Eleven Music generator and Iconic Voices Marketplace platforms it launched last year, both of which are cleared for commercial use. ElevenLabs says that every artist on the project “produced a fully original track that blends their signature sound with the capabilities of Eleven Music,” and retains full ownership of their work alongside earning 100 percent of any streaming revenue.