This week on SHIFT
AI can now generate a radio-ready track in seconds, which raises an awkward question: if a song can be made without a person, who gets paid when it plays? This week's episode, taped live at HumanX in Amsterdam, puts the question to two people who sometimes sit on opposite sides of the money. One built a hit with AI and the other collects royalties for 180,000 writers.
Ghazi Shami is the founder and CEO of Empire, a label, publisher and distributor that is as much a software company as a music one. Andrea Czapary Martin is the outgoing CEO of PRS for Music, the UK society that licenses music around the world. I ask them where the human element survives, what happens when a fan clones an artist's voice, and what they're each building next.
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Three things to listen for
1. The AI hit that split the industry
Ghazi describes a song called "Rubbers" that reached close to 100 million plays and was made primarily with AI. It was recut, polished and had lyrics changed by people, which is exactly why the Grammy debate got so heated: how much human involvement is enough?
2. Music royalties are a bigger data problem than Visa
Martin says PRS processes about three times more data than Visa transactions, since every song has at least six writers, each with publishers and labels. Her team built AI agents to hunt for unpaid money abroad, and to scrape the web for live set lists, because Shazam can't identify a playlist at a concert.
3. A "block or monetize" switch for cloned voices
Ghazi says Empire is working with YouTube and Google DeepMind on a tool called Voice ID, modeled on Content ID, that lets an artist block or monetize AI clones of their voice. He also tells the story of a songwriter who used voice models to pitch songs in other stars' voices, until he put one on Apple Music and the industry "had a meltdown."
With abundance, scarcity is going to be even more valued.
Listen now
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