TIDAL Cuts Off Royalties for Fully AI-Generated Music

TIDAL has become the first major streaming platform to completely cut off funding for music generated entirely by artificial intelligence. The new policy took effect on July 15, 2026, meaning tracks identified as one hundred percent AI-generated will not earn creators a single cent - no royalties, no monetization, and no option to sell them directly to fans through the platform.

TIDAL's new rules cover three elements. First, any track identified as entirely AI-generated receives a visible "AI" label in the app interface. Second, such a track can still be uploaded, played, and found through search, but neither the performer nor the label will earn anything from it - the platform excludes it from the payout system and from direct sales. Third, recordings that impersonate a specific artist's voice or likeness without their consent are automatically detected and removed from the service entirely.

Scale of the problem at Deezer

Data from rival Deezer shows why the industry has taken such a drastic step. That platform was the first to start tagging AI music with a special label back in January 2025, and over the course of 2025 it detected and flagged 13.4 million such tracks. In June 2026, the share of fully AI-generated recordings among daily uploads crossed 50 percent for the first time, translating to roughly 90,000 new tracks every day - just a year earlier, in June 2025, that figure stood at 18 percent.

More uploads do not mean more listening, though. Deezer reports that AI music accounts for only 1-3 percent of all plays on the platform, since these recordings are automatically excluded from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists. The bigger problem is fraud - as much as 85 percent of streams of fully AI-generated tracks in 2025 were identified as fraudulent and demonetized, compared with 8 percent of fraudulent plays across Deezer's entire catalog.

For nearly two years now we've been fighting fraud and the erosion of artists' revenue linked to AI music - Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer

A policy, not a ban

TIDAL stresses that the goal of the new policy is not to block the technology itself, but to protect creators' earnings and give listeners transparency. In its published policy document, the platform states that artists should be free to create using AI tools, while listeners should be able to make an informed choice about what kind of content they're listening to.

Artists should be free to create using AI tools, and listeners should have the autonomy to choose what kind of content they listen to - from TIDAL's AI policy

The company also notes that the document is a "living" set of rules that will be updated as detection technology evolves and new ways of bypassing filters emerge. TIDAL reserves the right to make adjustments as creators and fraudsters keep searching for new loopholes in the system.

How other platforms respond

Spotify isn't going that far for now - it allows the use of AI in music creation and doesn't downrank tracks solely because they were made with the help of artificial intelligence. Instead, the company is focusing on detecting spam and streaming fraud: in the year before rolling out its policy in September 2025, it removed more than 75 million tracks flagged as spam, often tied to stream manipulation. Apple Music lets distributors declare the degree of AI involvement in a recording, while Qobuz limits how much it promotes AI-created tracks in its recommendations.

Deezer has gone a step further than simply labeling tracks - it now offers its proprietary AI-detection technology to other streaming services, hoping to establish a shared transparency standard across the industry. That's a sign that the patchwork of inconsistent policies from individual platforms may soon give way to more unified rules across the whole market.

What it means for artists and listeners

For Polish artists working with digital distributors, this means having to accurately declare the extent to which a track was made using AI - a false declaration can result in the recording being removed from the platform. For listeners, the appearance of the "AI" label on tracks on TIDAL is the clearest signal yet from a major streaming platform, letting them consciously choose whether they want to support fully machine-generated work or purely human creativity.

Pressure on other platforms will keep growing if TIDAL's policy actually curbs the influx of low-quality recordings created purely to siphon off a share of the royalty pool. The music industry has been warning for months that the mass flood of cheap AI music dilutes the budget meant for real artists' payouts, regardless of how many listeners actually play those tracks.