TIDAL will strip royalties from AI-generated music and tag every track it catches

TIDAL is cutting off the money supply for AI-generated music. The streaming service announced a new policy that will prevent fully AI-generated tracks from earning royalties, collecting revenue from direct-to-fan sales, or being monetised in any way on its platform. TIDAL will also use automated tools to identify and remove AI-generated music that attempts to impersonate an artist or group.

Under the new rules, tracks that TIDAL identifies as entirely made by AI will receive a visible “AI” badge so listeners know what they are hearing. The company said it expects distributors to flag AI-generated content before it reaches the platform. The policy takes effect on July 15.

“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,” wrote Tony Gervino, TIDAL’s EVP and Editor-in-Chief, in the announcement. He added that many subscribers “do not want to be exposed to, or prompted to listen to, wholly AI-generated music.” Gervino clarified that the policy is not meant to oppose technological advancement but to protect the revenue streams of human artists.

The move places TIDAL alongside Deezer, which has taken the most aggressive stance in the streaming industry against AI-generated tracks. Deezer said in April that 44 percent of all new music uploaded to its platform daily, roughly 75,000 tracks, is fully AI-generated. It actively removes those tracks from recommendations, excludes them from editorial playlists, and offers its detection technology to rival platforms.

Spotify updated its own AI policies last September to label tracks containing AI-generated elements and filter spam, while still allowing AI tools in the music creation process. Apple Music introduced transparency tags in March that let labels and distributors disclose when AI played a role in a track’s creation. Qobuz has taken a harder line, removing AI-generated content from recommendations and committing to never generate music for its own catalogue.

TIDAL’s approach differs from all of them in one respect: demonetisation as the primary enforcement mechanism. Rather than simply labelling or hiding AI tracks, TIDAL is targeting the financial incentive that drives the flood of synthetic uploads in the first place. Whether cutting off royalties actually slows the deluge of AI music flooding streaming platforms is the question the policy is designed to answer.

Gervino pushed back on the idea that AI’s takeover of music is inevitable. “Regardless of what you are reading elsewhere, AI’s takeover of the music industry isn’t inevitable if we take even greater steps now to monitor and control it,” he wrote. The company called the policy a “living document,” signalling that the rules will evolve as AI music generation tools and detection capabilities change.

TIDAL is smaller than Spotify, Apple Music, or Deezer, but it has positioned itself as an artist-first platform since its founding and has a subscriber base that skews toward listeners who care about audio quality and artist compensation. If demonetisation proves effective at reducing the volume of AI-generated tracks that slip past listeners undetected, larger platforms may follow. If it does not, the industry will need a different answer to a problem that is growing faster than any single platform can solve.