French distributor Believe and its DIY service TuneCore have begun automatically refusing to distribute tracks made wholly or partly with AI services they consider unlicensed, which Believe calls "pirate studios". Suno, still being sued by Universal and Sony and not licensed by Believe, falls into that group. In the same update to its generative AI policy, Believe told Music Business Worldwide it had signed licensing deals with ElevenLabs and Udio. Both AI companies were already collecting music licences: ElevenLabs from Kobalt and Merlin, Udio from Universal, Warner, Merlin and Kobalt.
The blocking rests on detection tools that Believe founder and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie describes as about 99% reliable and able to tell which model and platform produced a given track. If the source is an unlicensed service, the release does not go out. Ladegaillerie admitted TuneCore has taken criticism on artist forums for the move but said it was the right call, and that the block applies in full to anything traced to an unlicensed studio.
His reasoning is legal as much as editorial. A few months earlier, he said, many assumed Suno and similar services would eventually be licensed by the big rights holders; he now thinks that unlikely for models already trained, which in his view leaves the music made on them infringing for the foreseeable future. Believe has written to the major streaming services urging them to adopt similar detection, and he warned distributors that keep shipping such tracks that they are building up future copyright liability for themselves.
His case to the streaming services is that their contracts already let them choose what to carry, and that tracks from unlicensed generators bring legal risk, degrade the listening experience and are widely used for streaming fraud. He reminded them that distributing infringing material can itself make a company liable, and suggested that choices which help a business in the short term could expose it to significant risk a few years later. He said he could not understand why the platforms were not already blocking such uploads.
The article places the policy against wider data. A review of 1,551 AI recordings it cites found more than nine in ten of the most popular AI tracks on streaming services were made with Suno, and over three quarters went out through DistroKid. Deezer had said earlier in April that about 75,000 fully AI tracks, 44% of its daily deliveries, were arriving each day. Ladegaillerie's counterpoint is that AI music still makes up less than 0.5% of streams, so the problem is real but much smaller than the upload figures suggest. In his view the flood of uploads has had an outsized effect on how investors value listed music companies, and distracts from both the real problems and the real opportunities.
He does not oppose generative AI itself. Believe's position, first set out in its 2023 responsible AI principles, pairs protecting artists and copyright with investing in tools that help them, and music video production is one area where it is spending, on the view that AI will make videos quicker and cheaper to produce. He told MBW he believes AI will help people make and learn to make better music, and broaden who gets to create, but that artists need to understand that using unlicensed tools risks takedowns and legal exposure. Believe was also one of five partners, with the three majors and Merlin, named in October as co-developers of Spotify's AI music products. He expects most music to involve AI in some way within a decade, and he sees the question of whether a model was trained on licensed music as more important than Universal's push for walled gardens: open, downloadable platforms are fine by him if they are licensed and pay artists for training. Walled gardens, where AI output cannot leave the platform, suit fans playing with an artist's work, he said, but not artists who use AI in their own releases. His short version, in his own words, is to "kill the illegal AI slop".
Beyond AI, Ladegaillerie told MBW he agrees with much of Bill Ackman's argument that Universal is undervalued, and he blamed the recent fall in music-company valuations mainly on slowing subscriber growth rather than on AI, predicting a strong chance that valuations recover within two to three years once fears of AI flooding the market fade. The policy follows TuneCore's recent settlement of a Universal-led lawsuit over manipulated audio uploads, which he said played no part in it.
Sources · 1