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Streaming services have spent the past two years managing an uncomfortable arithmetic problem. The total pool of money paid out to rights holders each month is roughly fixed, set by subscription revenue and advertising, while the number of tracks competing for a share of it has expanded sharply as AI generation tools have made it trivial to produce finished-sounding songs at almost no cost. Industry estimates of what proportion of uploads are now wholly or partly AI-generated vary widely and should be treated cautiously, but several major platforms have acknowledged the volume is large enough to affect how they calculate per-stream payouts.

• Some platforms exclude tracks under a minimum stream threshold from royalty pools entirely, aimed partly at low-effort AI uploads.
• Detection tools attempting to flag fully AI-generated tracks remain imperfect and are not disclosed in detail by the platforms using them.
• Licensing negotiations between labels and AI music firms are proceeding separately from platform-level payout policy, creating two parallel disputes.
• Songwriter and performer collecting societies have pushed back on filtering approaches they see as too blunt.