'Substantially Human-Made': The New Test for Signing a Track
In the past month, the music industry drew its first real line around generative AI — and it is a line that lands directly on the desk of every independent label. The majors, with the IFPI behind them, have proposed that chart-eligible music must be substantially human-made. Spotify is rolling out AI Persona badges this month. Beatport now blocks purely AI-generated uploads outright. This is not a technology story. It is an A&R story.
The rules being drawn
Read together, the proposals form a coherent doctrine:
- Substantially human-made. A song must be primarily created by humans — though nobody has yet agreed what percentage of a human makes the cut.
- Lawful training. Any AI service used must be authorised and hold rights to its training data.
- Disclosure. AI use should be declared on streaming platforms, the way parental advisory stickers once announced content.
- No manipulation. Synthetic identities must not be laundered into algorithmic discovery, editorial playlists, or charts.
The definitions are still soft, but the direction is not. Provenance is becoming a commercial property.
Why a techno label cares about provenance
Our demo inbox has changed faster than anyone's policy could. Tools that once assisted — stem separation, smart EQ, automated mastering — now compose, arrange, and voice entire productions. The surveys put numbers on it: a majority of producers use AI at the ideation stage, and a meaningful minority fold its suggestions into finished work. Only a sliver delegate production entirely.
None of that alarms us. What alarms us is the other end of the distribution: the flood of plausible music. Generic tension builds, synthetic ambiences, mood-board tracks that sound like a memory of a genre without ever having been felt. When anyone can manufacture competence, competence stops being a signal. Taste becomes the only filter left — and taste is a human asset.
What we ask before we sign
Provenance is no longer a philosophical question; it is a due-diligence checklist. Before we put ink on a contract, we now ask for things we never used to need:
The checklist
- Where is the human in this? We want to hear the decision, not just the output — the stems, the project file, the patch chain, the wrong turn that got corrected.
- Can you play it? A signed artist eventually stands in front of people. If the track cannot survive a live environment, the signing is fiction.
- Is the voice consistent? One track proves nothing. We look at an artist's last year of work, because a voice is a pattern, not a moment.
A demo used to be a promise. Now it is a claim — and claims get verified.
We are not anti-tool. AI-assisted mastering sits inside most modern release workflows, ours included. The line we draw is upstream: at the moment of authorship.
The curator's new job
Platforms will badge, chart rules will exclude, and that machinery will do its work at scale. But the trust layer of underground music was never the platform — it was the label. Fans did not learn to trust records because of an algorithm; they learned because a catalogue had taste, and kept it for years.
Disclosure is not a burden on that trust. It is the raw material of it. When we tell people what a record is and how it was made, we are not complying with an industry memo. We are doing the oldest job a label has: standing between the listener and the flood, and vouching for what gets through.