requiem for a “royalty-free” dream

When you (the artist) 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. Here at Big & Tall Records, our research has revealed that Suno has registered around 10,000 tracks in the past month. What does this mean? It means that These AI creations are being claimed within seconds on YouTube’s Content ID, Facebook and Instagram’s sound fingerprint systems, SoundCloud, TikTok, and more.

In other words Every user generating songs within these AI platforms have 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. Content creators don’t care if the company collects all the ad revenue from their videos' play counts, but composers do. Without this knowledge, artists will continue to believe that AI poses no threat to their livelihood.

The Strung-Out on Royalty-Free

The Musicbed and artlist.io have their artists hooked on their already meager crumbs of earnings, forcing a 50/50 split, constantly whispering sweet deceitful words in their ears. But this very moment AI music is destroying the Royalty-free music market. What are the thousands of struggling human artists to do about their precious income? In a matter of a year AI will succeed in completely dissolving the current content creation paradigm.

Tools that Youtube and Vimeo are already currently developing is an “add music” button directly on the youtube upload page. Allowing the user to generate music for “free” of course we know that Youtube will be collecting every cent of that music revenue.

What will Music Bed, Artlist, and Audio Jungle do to help the artists? They will join the ai audio generating band wagon as soon as they can. they will begin to ditch their human artists; or they will be absorbed by the coming tide of ai music. The ‘royalty-free’ paradigm drifting silently into obsolescence and obscurity. The new content generating paradigm will be one of extreme price competition. Who can provide the longest song generation at the lowest cost per month. And this will drive composers and artists alike back to the analog world. Right now the ai train is in our blindspot and about to crush our precious little world.

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. If you are a signed artist, Look out. AI is coming for your job. Entirely fake personas are already being marketed with 100% ai music and false identities. All for profit and being generated at an exponential rate. What will happen to your income? That is simple economics. There is only a certain amount of Ad-revenue available and ai is about to take 90% of that share. 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.

And yet, with every empty assurance, you cling to the hope that one day things will change, and you'll finally break free from this grim reality. a fleeting hope that it might still turn out ok. But the truth is, you and your art will remain trapped in a never-ending cycle of abuse and deception, your true potential forever out of reach.

Over time, artists may become desensitized to this twisted setup, with the ongoing manipulation and exploitation leading them to develop a form of Stockholm syndrome. Much like a victim held captive, they begin to identify with their captor, in this case artists are trapped between the sleazy middlemen who exploit their talents for personal gain and the machine who seeks their life blood.

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