RIAA's Mitch Glazier on AI Deepfakes, Labeling and the Napster Question

Mitch Glazier, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, is the guest on a new episode of The Verge's Decoder podcast, published 9 November 2026. The conversation covers AI deepfakes and the detection and labeling systems designed to identify AI-generated material, including the roles that platforms such as Spotify and YouTube play in those systems.

Glazier worked as a lawyer at the RIAA during the peer-to-peer litigation of the Napster era, and that history explains why the Napster comparison recurs in his public remarks on AI. In a separate Billboard video interview, titled "RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier on AI, Copyright & Congress", he addressed AI transparency, standardized labeling, and whether AI is the next Napster.

The RIAA says it works to protect artists' creative freedom and intellectual property. The organization runs a Gold & Platinum Program, which it describes as defining success in the recorded music industry. It also provides enforcement resources intended to help distinguish legal from illegal music practices related to piracy. Michele Ballantyne serves as the RIAA's COO.

The association's stance on enforcement has also appeared in policy statements. In March 2022, Glazier and David Israelite, president and CEO of the NMPA, released statements supporting the Tillis/Leahy proposal, which encourages private-sector efforts to combat piracy online.

Taken together, these statements point to a consistent preference for voluntary, industry-led mechanisms alongside legal enforcement. Labeling and detection fit the same pattern. A label applied at upload or verified at distribution is a metadata problem as much as a legal one, and it touches the systems platforms already use to match recordings and manage rights.

The original Napster dispute concerned copies of recordings moving between users without licenses. Generative systems raise a different question. A model's output may imitate a performer's voice or style without reproducing any existing file. Detection tools therefore aim at a signal that is harder to define than an audio fingerprint, the compact acoustic signature that matches a known recording. The Decoder discussion turns on how such signals could be recognized consistently across services.

In my view, the most useful open question is interoperability. A labeling scheme that works on one streaming service and disappears at the next offers little to listeners or artists. Standardized labeling, which Glazier raised in the Billboard interview, has value only if platforms, distributors and rights holders agree on what the label means and where it travels with a file.

There is also a constructive side to this moment. Clear labeling gives listeners a way to choose human-made or disclosed AI-assisted work, and it gives artists a documented basis for objecting when a synthetic imitation of their voice appears under their name. Whether that possibility becomes working infrastructure will depend on the platforms as much as on the labels.