Tidal said on June 29 that it will stop monetizing music it identifies as entirely generated by AI, a policy that cuts off royalties and direct-to-fan sales for those releases while keeping some AI-made or AI-assisted music available to listeners.
In a notice to users and a policy statement on its website, Tidal said its goal is to send royalties to work “directly produced, written, and performed by people.” The company said it will not knowingly assign royalty payments to music it determines is wholly AI-generated.
The line Tidal is drawing is narrower than a blanket ban. The company said artists should be allowed to use AI tools, and listeners should be able to choose whether they want that material. Tidal said it will work to identify and label AI-generated music and hold that content to what it called a higher content-integrity standard.
Tidal told 404 Media that it is using an outside partner for detection. The company defined “wholly AI-generated” as a track where every component was made with generative AI. Tidal said its detection tools will determine how specific tracks and artists are handled from July 15, when the royalty impact begins. The company said it did not yet have numbers to share.
The policy does not remove AI music from Tidal
Tidal’s announcement leaves a lot of practical questions unresolved, including how accurately the company can detect fully generated music and how it will handle projects that mix human performance with machine-generated vocals, instrumentation, lyrics, or production.
The company acknowledged that the industry is still arguing over whether some AI-generated music should be eligible for royalties, including music created using models trained under proper licenses. Tidal said that debate will continue as licensing models develop between rights holders and AI music platforms.
For now, the policy targets monetization rather than availability. According to 404 Media, AI-generated acts The Velvet Sundown and Breaking Rust remained available on Tidal after the announcement. Breaking Rust’s Tidal bio described it as AI-generated country music, while The Velvet Sundown’s page had no bio at the time.
That creates the obvious enforcement problem: labels and bios are easy; a reliable determination that every part of a song came from generative AI is harder. Tidal says detection will decide treatment after July 15, which means the first real test is whether the company can apply the rule consistently instead of just making a nicer-looking policy page.
Spotify has taken a different route
The move separates Tidal from Spotify’s more permissive posture. Spotify said in 2025 that it would fight AI spam with labeling and filtering, while also continuing to allow AI music on the service. Spotify later announced a deal with Universal that would let fans create covers and remixes of songs they already like.
AI-generated acts have already found large audiences on Spotify. Rolling Stone and The Guardian have reported that The Velvet Sundown and Breaking Rust have drawn millions of listens there. Spotify makes money from those streams, even when listeners may not know how the music was made.
Tidal is smaller than Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music, but it has long marketed itself around higher-quality audio and artist-friendly economics. Its new AI policy fits that positioning: fewer machine-made royalty claims, more emphasis on human creators. Whether that survives contact with upload pipelines and detection edge cases is the part Tidal has not yet proved.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
