Sweden's STIM makes AI licensing opt-in, one work at a time

Sweden's music rights society has made consent the default setting for AI. On 31 May 2026 STIM announced that its general meeting had voted through a separate rights category for AI, covering all STIM-affiliated creators from 1 June. The key line: no work becomes available for AI licensing automatically. A creator has to approve each specific work before it can go into a future AI licence.

What did STIM's members actually vote for?

AI now sits alongside STIM's other rights areas, such as live, radio and TV, and STIM says it is set up so it doesn't change how it represents creators anywhere else. Each creator gets three choices:

• Approve specific works for inclusion in AI licences.
• Approve nothing. STIM keeps monitoring those rights, but none of the works are licensed for AI.
• Opt the AI category out of STIM entirely and manage those rights some other way.

STIM's stated reason is that AI companies increasingly want licensed music and it wants to help build a legal market with clear terms and pay. The announcement contains no figures: no count of approved works, no AI income and no new licensees.

How does the licence underneath it work?

The category formalises a licence STIM launched in September 2025, which it called the world's first collective AI licence for music. The pilot ran with two Swedish startups: Songfox, which CISAC describes as the first licensee and a Stockholm company letting fans and creators make covers and AI compositions legally, and Sureel, STIM's preferred attribution provider. CISAC also notes that STIM represents more than 100,000 songwriters, composers and publishers.

STIM's licence information page has more detail than any of the press coverage:

• One model, one licence. The licence covers training one model version. Retraining or a new version needs a new licence.
• Two payment streams. A fixed fee based on the licensee's business size and the number of works, split equally across the included works, plus an ongoing percentage of the service's income. STIM says no concrete payout examples exist yet.
• Attribution, with a fallback. Licensees must use an attribution provider (Sureel is named) to link outputs to the works that influenced them, and initially report monthly. If attribution isn't reliable, STIM will distribute by how works were used in the training data.
• Narrow output rights. Generated music can go out through subscriptions and to streaming platforms. Large-scale advertising, TV, radio and film need a separate deal.
• Everyone has to agree. Works not wholly owned may need the master owner's permission and the consent of every co-author.

The first version only included works from songwriters and publishers STIM approached one by one, starting from master recordings held by rights holders in Cora Music, according to STIM's FAQ. The page is blunt: if you weren't asked, your music isn't included.

Who actually gets to say yes?

This is the artists-first part, and it is real. In most AI licensing so far, the decision is made in a deal between a company and a label or publisher. Udio's planned Starstruck app, for example, relies on artists being opted in through their label and publisher deals. STIM's category puts the switch in the songwriter's own hands, per song, and gives a third option of walking away from collective administration for AI altogether.

But read the co-author rule next to the per-work switch. Most commercial songs have several writers, and often a master owner who isn't any of them. Every one of them has to say yes. The works easiest to license will be ones held by a single writer who also controls the recording. That rewards self-releasing writer-producers who own everything, which is probably the right group to start with, and makes heavily co-written pop the slowest to join.

Will other societies copy it?

STIM clearly hopes so. Music Business Worldwide reported that STIM's then acting CEO, Lina Heyman, framed the licence as a blueprint for fair pay for creators and legal certainty for AI firms. The likelier pattern is copy and sue at the same time. When the licence launched, STIM's Simon Gozzi told SVT (our translation from the Swedish) that "some AI companies will probably need to approach this through lawsuits", pointing to the case its German counterpart had filed.

That is the honest limit. The licence only works with companies that build Sureel-style attribution into training. As The Batch pointed out, that makes it no use for getting paid by the big generators that already trained without it. A licence is a front door, and the companies that came in through the window won't use it.

What we think

Opt-in by work is the most creator-respecting model we have seen a collecting society put to a vote, and it deserves credit for that. Three second-order effects are worth watching.

Scale is the price of consent. A catalogue built one approval at a time, with every co-author signing, will be small for a long time. A small catalogue is less useful for training, so fewer licensees and smaller fees follow. Nearly nine months after launch, STIM has published no AI income figures, and the 31 May announcement names no new licensee. Until it does, members are being asked to switch works on without any idea what a "yes" is worth.

Per-version licensing is the clever bit. Paying per model version means each retrain is a new negotiation. That is the opposite of the one-off buyouts creators fear, and it is the detail other societies should copy first, whatever they decide about opt-in.

The exit option cuts both ways. Letting creators take AI rights out of STIM respects their control. It also lets the best-known writers negotiate privately, which could leave the collective pool holding mainly the works AI companies want least.

The consent question is about whose music trains a model. Using AI on your own ideas is a separate matter: browser-based assistants such as Veena, which help you produce your own tracks, don't raise it. For anyone represented by STIM, our advice is simple. Don't switch works on blind. Ask what the fixed fee per work is likely to be, check that your co-writers agree before you approve a song, and keep a list of what you've approved so you can match it against your royalty statements, which STIM says will show AI income in the same way as streaming, radio and TV income.