The Onset of the AI Remix Era

The music industry spent two years suing to stop fans from making AI remixes of its songs. And then, on May 21, it signed the deals to sell them the tool to do just that. Spotify and Universal's new agreement lets fans generate AI covers and remixes of participating artists' catalogs, sold as a paid add-on, with artists sharing the revenue. It's the sort of modest product announcement that gives away the game: the same companies that call AI music an existential threat have decided it's a revenue line, provided the checks clear.

For this edition of Storylines, we'll slowly unravel this story, and try to understand what it means for the larger culture of music. We’ll start with the deal itself, then follow the money that made it inevitable, from the quiet billions behind the catalog boom to the battle lines the platforms are drawing over what counts as real music. We'll meet the superfans who've started making the songs instead of streaming them, and the working artists organizing outside the whole fight. And we'll present it through contemporaneous coverage from some of music's finest minds and best analysis, linked out and annotated below, before reaching back into the archive for the essay that saw all of this coming twenty years ago.

Underneath the deal, there are two currents. Platforms optimize for engagement, engagement rewards nostalgia, and catalog now accounts for nearly three-quarters of US listening. Value that dependable draws serious, quiet money: Blackstone, sovereign wealth funds, Sony's four-billion-dollar money grabs.

Point the most future-forward technology at all that and it pushes listeners into the past. What's left unsettled is the definition of what an “artist” is once tools like Suno and Udio dissolve technical skill as a price of entry and the remix deal completely obliterates the line between creator and consumer. Of course, the working artist stands outside both of these futures, trying to find their footing in a sea of shredded nostalgia. The tool doesn't even have a launch date yet, but the fight over what it means is underway, and we're keeping this file very open.