The music industry is building the tech to hunt down AI songs

“Attribution shouldn’t start when the song is done — it should start when the model starts learning,” says Sean Power, the company’s cofounder. “We’re trying to quantify creative influence, not just catch copies.”

Rather than detecting AI music after it spreads, some companies are building tools to tag it from the moment it’s made. Vermillio and Musical AI are developing systems to scan finished tracks for synthetic elements and automatically tag them in the metadata.

Detection systems are being embedded across the entire music pipeline: in the tools used to train models, the platforms where songs are uploaded, the databases that license rights, and the algorithms that shape discovery. The goal isn’t just to catch synthetic content after the fact. It’s to identify it early, tag it with metadata, and govern how i... See more