Apple Music will tell you when a song was made by a machine — but the uploader decides whether to say so
Apple told music industry partners on 20 August that tracks flagged as "materially generated using AI" will carry a label visible to listeners on Apple Music "later this year". The tagging machinery itself launched quietly in March, when Apple made AI Transparency Tags available to record labels and distributors; what changes now is that the tags become required and, for the first time, shown to the public. Tags cover four things separately — the recording, the artwork, the composition and lyrics, and the music video — and Apple's definition catches anything "primarily derived from a generative AI service". What Apple did not say is how it will check. The tags are applied by whoever uploads the track, on the reasoning that they know how it was made, and the email set out no penalty for getting it wrong, even though Apple has built AI-detection tooling of its own. For scale, from a rival: Deezer said in July that AI-generated tracks had passed 50% of its daily uploads, averaging about 90,000 a day in June, while accounting for only 1-3% of actual listening — and that 85% of those streams were fraudulent.
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