The RIAA and IFPI are leading a music industry push to get AI-made tracks labeled across the world’s streaming services.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report the news on Friday (July 10), noting that the music orgs plan to work with services such as Spotify and Apple Music to attach the labels.
Also behind the plan are the Recording Academy, SAG-AFTRA, the Human Artistry Campaign, and the American Association of Independent Music, according to the report.
The RIAA-led group is putting forward two tags, drawing a line between fully AI-generated tracks and those only partly made with AI.
The first, “AI-generated,” would apply to a track built entirely by AI from a text prompt, or one where a machine produced the lead vocal or the main instrumental takes.
The second, “AI-assisted,” would flag a track that is mostly the work of people but leans on AI in places.
Two AI label designs are shown in the WSJ story: a black tile displaying “AI” in white capitals for fully AI-generated music, and a white tile showing “ai” in lowercase for AI-assisted tracks.
The move arrives amid growing calls for more transparency on streaming services in the age of AI. MBW founder Tim Ingham argued in June that the platforms should “Label The Slop”, pointing out that Deezer already flags AI tracks in its app while Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music do not.
A Deezer/Ipsos study of 9,000 listeners found that 97% could not tell AI songs from human-made ones, yet 80% wanted fully AI tracks clearly labeled.
RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier told the WSJ that plenty of fans are happy to listen to AI music, as long as they can tell when a real person is involved.
“But flexibility in the creative process also means that artists who want to use AI in the creative process should be able to do so,” Glazier said. “Transparency is just the best way to have it both ways.”
The tags would sit on a track much as the “explicit” marker does today, according to the report.
For now, they would say nothing about AI used in a song’s composition or lyrics, or in its cover art and music videos.
The WSJ report notes that “AI usage is flagged voluntarily by artists, record labels and distributors”.
The Digital Media Association (DiMA), which represents Spotify, Apple and other streaming firms, said it was watching the move and wanted fuller, more reliable AI data to travel with recordings, according to the report.
“That information flows best when it travels the entire path from creator to fan, and our members rely on industry partners to make that possible,” DiMA President and CEO Graham Davies said in a statement.
DiMA did not say if its members would adopt the two proposed tags.
Spotify announced in September that it would support the new DDEX industry standard for AI disclosures in music credits. The company also began testing AI tags in its song credits in April, but only where an artist has chosen to disclose AI use through their label or distributor.
The company said in September 2025 that it had removed more than 75 million “spammy” tracks over the prior year, as it brought in rules against impersonation and AI-enabled fraud.
Spotify also introduced a new verification badge for artist profiles on its platform in April and said that “at launch, profiles that appear to primarily represent AI-generated or AI-persona artists are not eligible for verification”.
France’s Deezer, meanwhile, says it was the first streaming service to detect and tag AI music at the platform level, back in 2025.
Deezer said in April that it was taking in close to 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks a day, more than 44% of everything newly delivered to it.
Deezer has also said that up to 85% of streams on fully AI-generated music were fraudulent in 2025, and that it strips those streams out of royalty payments.
TIDAL set out a policy in June to tag tracks it identifies as fully AI-generated and stop them earning royalties.
High-fidelity rival Qobuz announced its own detection system in February, saying it would tag AI-generated tracks and remove those found to be impersonating artists or manipulating streaming activity.
Apple Music, meanwhile, launched a tagging system in March that relies on labels and distributors to declare AI-generated content, rather than detecting it at the platform level.Music Business Worldwide
