Tidal Will No Longer Pay Royalties for AI-Generated Music

Tidal, a music streaming service, has announced that it will automatically label music created entirely by artificial intelligence and prevent it from earning royalty payments, according to Music Business Worldwide (29 June 2026).

The policy draws a clear line between songs made by humans and those made by machines. AI-generated tracks will be tagged with a visible label and kept out of the payment pool. Tidal also stated that it will not use songs uploaded by artists to train AI systems, a commitment Digital Music News reported in March 2026.

Why does this matter. When thousands of AI-generated background tracks — ambient sounds, loops, and fillers — are uploaded to a platform, they dilute how much money each human artist receives per stream. It's like having more people at a dinner table, so the shared bill gets divided into smaller pieces. Tidal's decision to remove AI tracks from the payment system eliminates the financial incentive to fill the platform with machine-made music.

The label serves another purpose. When tracks are marked as AI-generated, other music companies and recommendation systems can identify and handle them separately if they choose to. Whether they actually will is not yet clear, but at least the machinery to do so now exists.

Tidal also promised that it will not use artists' music to train AI systems. This matters because Tidal's catalog — known for high-quality audio — would be valuable to companies building music-generation AI tools. Blocking this use stops one way artists' own recordings could be turned into tools that compete with them.

These two actions directly address the two biggest complaints musicians have about AI audio right now: AI-generated songs eating into their income, and their own music being used to build the AI systems that compete with them.

There is a catch. Detecting whether a song is entirely AI-generated is hard. There are no universal standards yet for marking AI audio, though organizations are working on them. If Tidal relies mainly on artists and uploaders being honest about whether their music is AI-made, the policy will only work if people follow it. Tidal has not explained which method it uses to identify AI music, and that is a gap worth noting.

Enforcing a rule against using artists' music for AI training also requires ongoing vigilance and, if someone cheats, the ability to take legal action.

Tidal is not the biggest streaming service by number of subscribers. But it has built its reputation on paying artists better and offering higher-quality audio than competitors. Adding AI protections fits with that brand. Whether larger platforms like Spotify or Apple Music will follow suit is unclear; they face different business pressures and have more complicated licensing deals.

What matters right now is that Tidal has published a clear, measurable policy. Artists and their representatives now have a concrete example of what music-industry protections against AI can look like. For a long time, musicians have asked streaming platforms for real commitments on AI. One platform has now provided two.