When you first discovered royalty-free music you were like Jared Leto staring into Jennifer Connelly's eyes in Requiem for a Dream. You were naive, but that's what made the connection so beautiful — a love story between you and your art, full of care, commitment, and making money on the side. You were devoted to your craft, eager to create and share your unique sound with the world. But then it all goes wrong…
Royalty-Free Music Is Dead. Here's Why.
AI tools like Suno, Soundraw, and Soundful are taking over the royalty-free market. Most filmmakers and content creators find the AI version "good enough," with nearly unlimited songs for less than $20 a month. Platforms like Musicbed and Artlist.io will either adapt to AI or sink.
So where does that leave the already struggling artists? Competing not only with each other but now with the machine itself. And it will be a fight to the death.
Make no mistake. AI is winning the "royalty-free" market. It already has. Our research has revealed that Suno has registered around 10,000 tracks in the past month. These AI creations are being claimed within seconds on YouTube's Content ID, Facebook and Instagram's sound fingerprint systems, SoundCloud, TikTok, and more.
Every user generating songs within these AI platforms has already lost ownership of every "creation." AI companies creating songs at an exponential rate also claim sole ownership of every track. This is why it's so cheap.
Strung-Out on Royalty-Free
Musicbed and Artlist.io have their artists hooked on meager crumbs of earnings, forcing a 50/50 split. But this very moment AI music is destroying the royalty-free music market. In a matter of a year AI will succeed in completely dissolving the current content creation paradigm.
Tools that YouTube and Vimeo are already developing — an "add music" button directly on the upload page. Allowing the user to generate music for "free" — of course YouTube will be collecting every cent of that music revenue.
What will Musicbed, Artlist, and AudioJungle do? They will join the AI bandwagon. They will begin to ditch their human artists — or be absorbed by the coming tide. The 'royalty-free' paradigm drifting silently into obsolescence.
We as artists must step away from AI. Not just for our livelihood but because there are no ethics within the AI space. It is a blind profit grab of the spiritually devoid. Entirely fake personas are already being marketed with 100% AI music and false identities.
At Big & Tall Records we recommend to all artists to take a big step away from anyone and everyone who chooses AI over human. Drawing a clear distinction and line between what is real and what is AI-generated content.