Tidal will stop paying royalties on fully AI-generated songs starting July 15

[]

Tidal is done paying for machines. On June 29 the streaming service posted a new AI policy that, starting July 15, stops royalties on any track it decides was wholly generated by AI, tags those tracks with an "AI" badge, and locks them out of monetization and direct-to-fan sales.

That last part is the move. Plenty of platforms already label AI music. Spotify rewrote its policy in 2025 to flag AI tracks and cut spam. Apple Music started adding transparency tags this March. Deezer, which says 44% of the songs uploaded to it every day are AI-generated, pulls them from recommendations and editorial playlists and hands its detection tech to rivals. Labeling is table stakes now. Tidal is betting that the thing that actually slows the flood is money, or the lack of it.

"Regardless of what you are reading elsewhere, AI's takeover of the music industry (and your recommendations) isn't inevitable if we take even greater steps now to monitor and control it," wrote Tony Gervino, Tidal's EVP and editor-in-chief, in the announcement.

How it works

From mid-July, listeners will see an icon on tracks Tidal has judged to be 100 percent AI. The company says it will widen the label to "substantially" AI-generated work as its detection improves, and it expects distributors to flag AI content before it reaches the platform. The royalty cutoff is already in effect. Tidal says it wants payouts going to music "directly produced, written and performed by people," and the rule covers Tidal Upload, its self-serve pipeline for independent artists, so the bedroom-uploader lane is included, not exempt.

There's a fraud layer too. Tidal says it will block or remove AI music tied to deception: songs impersonating real artists, high-volume upload schemes, and the unusual streaming behavior that signals a bot farm working a payout. Automated tools do the flagging.

The line Tidal is punting on

"Wholly or substantially generated" is a clean phrase and a messy reality. Most modern records touch an AI tool somewhere, a mastering assistant, a stem separator, a vocal cleanup. Tidal's line is 100 percent for now, which is the easy call. The gray middle, a human songwriter feeding prompts into a generation model and comping the results, is where detection gets hard and where the badge will eventually have to make judgment calls. The company is calling the policy a "living document," which is the honest way of saying it will move the line as the tech moves.

For a platform Tidal's size, this is more signal than earthquake. It won't reset the industry by itself. But it may be the first service to say the quiet part in dollars: if a machine made the whole thing, it doesn't get paid here.