Now more than ever, the music industry is at a crossroads, balancing the potential benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for artistic production. AI music generators, like Soundful and Suno, have become increasingly sophisticated, allowing users to create songs from text prompts, extract vocals from existing works, and transform lyrics into complete songs. For years, musicians and producers have experimented with technology to enhance their creative process, using AI for mastering tracks or making beats. The barriers to creation are lower than ever, but the rise of fully AI-powered artists marks a distinct shift and brings new questions about authenticity and artistic value.
The issue of AI artists came to the forefront when Xania Monet, an AI R&B artist, signed a $3 million record deal with Hallwood Media in September 2025. Telisha Jones, the human behind Xania, writes the lyrics and uses the Suno AI platform to generate vocals and instrumentals. Xania’s songs have been successful on the music charts, with “How Was I Supposed to Know” topping both R&B Digital Sales and R&B/Hip-Hop Digital Song Sales within the same week.
The music world has already faced controversies about AI use in songs, as seen with the popular 2023 AI-generated song “Winter’s Cold” that featured artificial vocals of Drake. Xania’s record deal has resparked the conversation, with several artists weighing in on the debate. Prominent singer Kehlani shared in a video on Instagram, “[AI] can sing the entire song. It can make the entire beat… And they don’t ever have to credit anyone. This is so beyond out of our control, and nothing and no one on earth will be able to justify AI to me.” In addition to flagging the threat to devaluing genres, R&B singer SZA highlighted the detrimental environmental impacts, writing on her Instagram story that “[People] and children are dying from the harm [and] pollution AI energy centers are creating.”
Others have found potential value in AI artists. Timbaland, producer of hit songs such as “Promiscuous” and “Apologize,” has embraced AI as a tool to address what he views as a “boring” time for music. Notably, Timbaland is a strategic advisor for Suno and founder of the AI record label New Stage Zero. Compared to artists, it is unsurprising that labels and producers are more amenable to the artificial creation of songs as they can get to artistic production faster, cut out artistic intermediaries, and claim a larger share of the profits.
Still, the ethical questions about originality and creative expression raised by artists like Kehlani and SZA point to deeper legal consequences. The U.S. Copyright Office Compendium emphasizes that intellectual property rights require human authorship. Section 306 of the Compendium states the Office “will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being.” Additionally, Section 313 states the Office “will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.” AI-generated works that lack meaningful human input are unlikely to receive copyright protection, but the threshold for sufficient human input remains an open question. Additionally, there are concerns about infringement when AI music generators train their platforms on existing, copyrighted music without the original artist’s consent. Suno, the platform used to create Xania’s tracks, is facing several lawsuits from both independent artists and major labels for allegedly “stream-ripping,” or illicitly downloading music from YouTube, and for scraping lyric database websites to power the platform.
If record deals like the one between Hallwood Media and Xania Monet become more prevalent, it may pose real economic and creative challenges to the music industry. AI-generated music is gradually increasing in quality and may pose a competitive threat to the market by reducing demand and removing licensing opportunities for smaller artists, especially those that lack the capital to battle platforms like Suno without a major label behind them. Artificial artists would not need royalties and could saturate streaming platforms by generating a seemingly endless number of tracks, eclipsing the work of actual artists with works devoid of the emotional connection from authentic human creativity. Labels, producers, and artists alike must remain vigilant as machine-made music threatens to undermine the very foundation of the music industry that sustains them.