Three companies, two trade bodies and one union decide what you hear, and whether artificial intelligence gets to sing at all.
Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment don't write songs. They own the rights to other people's songs. Sign a contract with them as an artist, and your catalog - the recordings, the lyrics, the right to release them elsewhere - runs through them for decades ahead. Together the three control roughly 70% of all the money that flows into the music industry worldwide: streaming, physical media, synchronization for ads and films. The remaining thousands of labels split whatever's left. So when you hear "the music industry reacts" to something, it usually means these three are talking.
RIAA, the US recording industry's trade body, isn't a musicians' union and isn't a government institution. It's a lobby and legal arm, paid by Universal, Warner, Sony and their smaller partners, to count sales, certify platinum albums, and, increasingly these days, sue tech companies. It was RIAA that filed the lawsuit against Suno and Udio - the two platforms that write songs from a text description - back in 2024, claiming their models were trained on stolen recordings without permission.
IFPI is the global version of RIAA, just beyond US borders. It brings together recording companies from around the world, publishes the industry's annual revenue report, and is the voice that sits at the table with governments when copyright and AI laws get written. If RIAA is the guild guarding the craft in America, IFPI is the same guild with branches everywhere else.
SAG-AFTRA, the US union for actors and performers, sounds like an outsider on this list, but it also covers singers, session musicians and voice performers on recordings. It's the union that negotiated a contract with the three labels requiring them to get explicit consent and pay before releasing a song with an artificial copy of someone's voice. This year RIAA, IFPI, the Grammy Awards and SAG-AFTRA came out together with two labels you'll see more and more: "AI-Generated" - the song is entirely from a machine, and "AI-Assisted" - a human was in the room.
My take
No matter how they wrap it in talk of "the artists", RIAA and IFPI are mainly defending the bottom line of the three companies that pay them. The lawsuit against Suno isn't a fight for creators, it's a dispute over who gets the license to sell AI voices, while indie musicians wait on the sidelines. Warner has already signed a deal with Suno - meaning the company decided AI music brings in more money than damage. Sony is still fighting, because the stake is precedent, not principle.
The "AI-Generated" and "AI-Assisted" labels sound reasonable to me, but I'm not fooling myself that they come from concern. They come because an industry that sells authenticity has to prove it knows the difference. I build AI systems every day and I know how hard it is to trace where a sound came from. If the three companies really want transparency, the same rule should apply to the archives they themselves quietly feed into their own AI models - with no label for anyone.