Topic
Udio's licensed app Starstruck will let fans cover, reimagine, remix or write new songs, but only as a named, opted-in artist, with royalties paid on every creation and nothing allowed to leave the app. It is AI as fan merchandise rather than an artist's tool, and the opt-in usually runs through the label or publisher, not the artist.
AIvia Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group and TikTok signed a new multi-year licence on 22 May 2026 that keeps UMG's catalogue on the app and repeats a pledge to remove "unauthorized AI-generated music". Neither company has said what "unauthorised" means, how tracks are detected or how an artist can appeal, and that gap falls hardest on independent artists who use AI tools legitimately.
Industryvia TikTok Newsroom
Tencent Music says more than 10 million people use its AI music production platform, and its tools can publish a generated song to QQ Music in one click. On its Q4 call it said songs made wholly by AI get a different royalty-sharing model, while AI-assisted songs sung by humans stay on the traditional one. We haven't seen a big Western streaming service draw that line in public.
AIvia Tencent Music Entertainment Group
Splice launched Variations and Craft, with Magic Fit to follow, and says the original sample creator is paid each time their sound is used as a source and each time a variation is downloaded. It is one of the clearer consent-and-pay designs in music AI, but Splice hasn't said what a use is worth, and producers carry the release risk.
AIvia Splice
Ne-Yo's Pacific Music Group is now the global label and Asia manager for TaTa Taktumi, the AI act from Timbaland's Stage Zero, which has been recast as a "hybrid artist" with a private performer of Filipino heritage behind it. Nobody has said who gets paid, who is credited, or what that performer owns.
AIvia US Copyright Office
One email a week: the music-tech and AI-in-music news that mattered, and what we think about it.