For anyone that can’t read the article:
Title: We’re For Real
Tidal’s introducing a new AI policy to protect artists and their fans. June 29, 2026 by Tony Gervino
Tidal is not here to bash technological advancement, with today’s launch of our AI policy. Let’s make that clear. We understand how advances in technology offer myriad options for artists who want to better understand their fans’ behavior, build new tools for recording and engineering their music, and automate their workflow. Hell, they can even build their own instruments.
It’s already proven valuable for the purposes of time-saving and cost-saving, and has aided people that may need a nudge to get over a creative roadblock. After all, who are we to tell an artist that they can’t experiment? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
Fact is, it becomes more difficult every day to maintain the human connection between authentic artists and authentic fans — which is the pathway toward creating economic empowerment in an industry where it is increasingly difficult to do so.
However …
Those examples we just cited are not why we’re establishing guardrails. Rather, it’s because our inboxes (and your world, we’re assuming) are inundated with music that is created completely AI-generated and impersonating existing artists purely for financial gain.
We are committed to protecting and rewarding organic creativity to avoid compromising an artist’s ability to connect with and build their fandom from Tidal subscribers. Many have told us they do not want to be exposed to — or prompted to listen to — wholly AI-generated music.
So we are making today’s announcement with the understanding that it is a living document and we will continue to evolve as the advancements in technology warrant.
Regardless of what you are reading elsewhere, AI’s takeover of the music industry (and your recommendations) isn’t inevitable if we take even greater steps now to monitor and control it.
Because Tidal is committed today and every day to fight for artists’ rights. That was a day-one promise that will not change.
Here are the highlights of our new AI policy, which goes into effect on July 15:
Tidal will identify and tag AI-generated music in our app. Listeners will see an “AI” badge next to music we detect as wholly AI-generated.
Tidal will not tolerate AI-generated music that impersonates an artist or group, or that facilitates fraudulent activity. We’re implementing automatic tools to remove these releases immediately and on an ongoing basis.
Tidal will not allow music that is 100% AI-generated to be monetized. No royalties will go to such releases, nor will AI-generated uploads be eligible for direct-to-fan sales.
We will update Tidal’s AI policy as the technology continues to evolve.
Can’t even read their post, and I’m not disabling my network adblock for it.
By “automatically” tagging music, are they using their own AI to tell if something is AI? Surely there won’t be any problems with the hallucination machine checking to see if something was hallucinated, and actual indie artists won’t be constantly flagged and their revenue stolen. /s
In the article they just say they have a new AI policy and that they will identify 100% AI generated music and label them accordingly, without stating how they will identify such music. “Wholly” and “100%” are emphasized, by the way. So I guess they will still allow music that is 99% AI generated.
See my comment to read the full article text, I extracted it.
It’s a nice thought, but it depends on people disclosing that they used AI.
They’ve created a monetary incentive for people to hide their use of AI. Sure, they may catch the people who use commercial services which watermark their output but music generation can be done on relatively inexpensive (compared to frontier LLMs) hardware and there is no way to automatically detect it.
It’s a good thing that Tidal is doing, I’m just skeptical that it’ll do much except to make people more creative about hiding it.
From the original email I received from them, it sounded like they have an AI detection tool that would automatically apply the AI tag. They said they’re starting with tagging songs that are 100% generated but will expand that to any AI songs once they have the tech for it
IMO one of the worse aspects of slop in the system is that one person can produce so much of it. One person uploading a ton of music without tagging it as AI will probably throw some internal flag in the system for review, so at minimum there will either be less mass-posted slop or it’ll force people to upload from multiple accounts, which also has certain flags to look for.
Nice
Between that, having high bit rate music, and last I recall being the music streaming platform that pays the actual artist the most, Tidal is making a strong case for being the best platform out there.
Makes me pretty glad I switched to Tidal
Does streaming music off a proprietary platform owned by a rapist makes you glad?
And I assume you only stream from the finest non proprietary platform owned by a cooperative of saintly patrons? What platform do you use?
You are on lemmy, one of the finest non proprietary platform owned by a cooperative of saintly patrons.
Personally, I stream my own media from an old PC at home using navidrome.
I also use tidal for music that I have not get bought. Not sure what that person is on about.
Eventually I will put the time and effort to move over to a self hosted system, but as of yet I haven’t.
Grand standing from your high horse helps no one, and makes those of us that agree with the position seem like jackasses from association, so please refrain.
How about just delete it?
Just depends on how and what you do with it. All this means is people will just hide their usage of AI. Used an LLM to come up with some lyrics? Just don’t disclose it. Sampled and mixed with AI, don’t disclose it. Hell all of the mastering tools now have AI jammed in there as well.
I like AI music for certain things just having a bit of music helps me focus
You live in a world saturated with music. You never needed a generative AI to do that
A quick googleing says tidal has 110 million songs, spotify 100 million, apple music 100 million, youtube music 100 million… you get the idea there is functionally an unlimited ammount of human generated music. You will never finish any of these services’ catalogs. Don’t use slop.
Love it!
Blocking from royalties is a shitty move. Why don’t they let AI artists earn.
Yikes
Because no human did any work to create that slop. People deserve to be paid for their work and ai slop is just plagiarism to an industrial scale.
“AI artists” 😂
Yes, people who use AI to create art.
@garbage_world @lobut username checks out
They are preventing AI to earn few cents /s
Tidal pay artists more than most platforms, and over four times as much per stream as Spotify. That’s not to say it’s not still part of a broken system, but most other platforms are worse.
While that’s true, it’s a low bar. Ideally artists get some meaningful payments. There is also an issue how they count streams, do they count them correctly etc. From what I remember, it’s very shady.
