Infinite Licensing in AI Music

Dae Bogan and Scott Cohen (then Chief Innovation Officer, Warner Music Group) presenting the lecture “Music 2020: The Next Era of Innovation in the Music Industry” at Music Biz Conference 2019

For a few years now, in private conversations with various technologists, music rightsholders and fellow data nerds, I’ve been using, and trying to coin, the term “infinite licensing” to describe the concept of real-time AI-powered dynamic licensing of rights in both generative-AI and single-source derivative AI music applications.

No, I am not talking about smart contracts, which are finite preset rules hardcoded in a file that is then minted to a blockchain, but rather the convergence of AI (conceptual/subjective/ecosystem) and blockchain (context/ownership) within the permission layer of applications that can generate an infinite ♾️ combination of licensing deal terms.

Infinite licensing would behave sort of like an oracle within applications to dynamically value and clear rights in machine-to-machine, business-to-business, and consumer-to-machine applications, going beyond the scope of human objectivity, individual experience in negotiation and valuation, and workload capacity in the licensing process.

It removes limiting royalty formulas and most favored nations models and replaces them with highly customized and more commercially accurate representations of value at a given point in time.

I imagine a future where an AI system built on an LLM that has learned from previous licensing deals (and the outcomes and missed opportunities of such deals), ingested airplay and streaming stats, interpreted correlations and trends, while calculating the lost value of undervalued deals, analyzed historical sync data, quantifies hype, ingested sales data, and consumer behavior and sentiment data, etc. would dynamically determine rates and terms for gen-AI and single-source derivative AI music outputs.

Infinite licensing, unlike smart contracts, could factor in variations in types of use, the real commercial value of the source music involved, the perceived cultural value of music creators involved, the market value of the opportunity, and much more.

The blockchain aspect, which has been in development across a variety of projects and startups for over 10 years now, would provide the architecture for transparent and immutable rights management while remuneration could be supported by cryptocurrency.

In 2019, when I presented my lecture “Music 2020: The Next Era of Innovation in the Music Industry” at the California Institute of The Arts and again at Music Biz Conference, I argued that artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cryptocurrency would be among the technologies that will transform the music industry in the 2020’s.

We’re halfway through the 2020’s and I think someone will figure out infinite licensing before 2030.

November 5, 2025

The Permission Layer for AI Music: Consent, Attribution, and Getting Artists Paid

The Permission Layer for AI Music: Consent, Attribution, and Getting Artists Paid

🗓️ Wednesday, November 12, 2025
⏰ 9am PT • 11am CT • 12pm ET

How do you scale artist consent across millions of AI-generated tracks? What infrastructure makes attribution and payment actually possible?

AI music is charting on Billboard, signing major label deals, and reshaping production workflows. This panel brings together the architects building the permission layer to explore the frameworks being built right now—from control and consent to metadata and royalty tracking—that will determine how AI music enters advertising, brand campaigns, and commercial licensing.

Essential for brand marketers, creative directors, music supervisors, artists, business affairs teams, and anyone navigating music licensing in the AI era.

Host/Moderator: Abbi Press, Global Lead Business Affairs Manager, Creative at Uber | Founder of The Double Helix

Speakers:

Daouda Leonard, Co-Founder & CEO, CreateSafe
Dae Bogan, Head of Third-Party Partnerships, The Mechanical Licensing Collective
Marc Rucker, Associate Director of Artist & Industry Relations, SoundExchange
Tushar Apte, Music Producer/Songwriter/Composer, Warner Chappell Music

November 1, 2025

On AI in the Music Industry

A screenshot of the header of an article by CNN that is referenced in this piece.

I have been writing and talking about the use of AI in the music industry since I developed and taught the course “Music Tech Innovation: Launching New Ventures” at UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music in 2016 when I was an Innovation Fellow at the UCLA Center for Music Innovation.

At the time, there were dozens of startups in accelerators and incubators across the US and around the world building AI tools and ML projects to address various aspects of music creation and data analytics.

I had been running my consultancy agency, Rights Department, where I helped founders navigate the intellectual property implications of their startups as well as develop go-to-market strategies. I was also a mentor to startups through a few accelerator programs and an advisor to a roster of music tech and digital media startups through my ENT Ventures, LLC advisory brand. Later, I would feature some of these companies, including those involved in cryptocurrency, augmented reality, NFTs, and blockchain in my lecture that I gave at universities and the Music Biz Conference titled “Music 2020: The Next Era of Innovation in the Music Industry” (https://daeboganmusic.com/2018/10/12/music-2020-the-next-era-of-innovation-in-the-music-industry/)

In early 2019, I wrote a note titled “Are Founders Of AI Music Services Being Disingenuous When They Tell Human Music Creators Not To Worry Or Are They Just Clueless?” where I asked:

“Recently, we’ve seen AVIA become the first AI to be recognized as a composer represented by the French performing rights society SACEM (I have bigger concern over the implication of recognizing AI as a composer and what that could mean to the legal definition of an author under copyright law) and Endel recently became the first AI to land a major label record deal with Warner Music Group.

If AVIA is a composer and Endel is a recording artist, and they can produce massive volumes of content (WMG is releasing 20 albums by Endel this year alone), what does this mean for the quality and pace of human-created music?” (https://daeboganmusic.com/2019/03/22/are-founders-of-ai-music-services-being-disingenuous-when-they-tell-human-music-creators-not-to-worry-or-are-they-just-clueless/)

This past week, ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN — the largest public performance organizations in North America that represent millions of music creators — put out a joint statement announcing the acceptance of registrations of partially AI-generated songs and thus clarifying that partially AI-generated songs are eligible to receive public performance royalty payments. (https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ascap-bmi-and-socan-will-now-accept-registrations-of-partially-ai-generated-musical-works/)

So, the news that AI singer Xania Monet being charted for radio airplay on Billboard means that the songwriter will be able to receive public performance royalties for those plays, in addition to the royalties for the streams on digital music services. (https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/01/entertainment/xania-monet-billboard-ai)

So, that brings me back to the question I asked in 2018: “Are Founders Of AI Music Services Being Disingenuous When They Tell Human Music Creators Not To Worry Or Are They Just Clueless?”

In September this year, I spoke on a panel about AI in the music industry at the Bogotá Music Market in Bogotá, Colombia. I argued that music creators and consumers will have to reconcile our tolerance for creativity and authenticity in the AI-music era and promoted the responsible use of AI as a tool, an innovation in the evolution of the arts no different, fundamentally, from innovations of decades past (enter the printing press, the electronic guitar and synthesizers). (https://www.instagram.com/p/DOgkjVUDT1A)

Some artists will leverage AI as a tool (there are many use cases other than generative AI vocals). Some will resist and possibly fall short. But what is clear to me is that the evolution, which begun as scrappy projects by founders and small teams in the 2010s is now being accelerated by multi-billion dollar investments, regulatory overhauls, and innovative creators who enjoy and do not fear new tools.

And what about consumers? How do consumers feel?

March 22, 2019

Are Founders Of AI Music Services Being Disingenuous When They Tell Human Music Creators Not To Worry Or Are They Just Clueless?

Several founders of artificial intelligence (AI) music creation applications have stated that human music creators need not fear their AI programs, which can turn out a massive amount of computer-generated compositions every week.

These AI services have used, and continue to use, human-created compositions to improve upon the AI program’s ability to algorithmically create music compositions.

Recently, we’ve seen AVIA become the first AI to be recognized as a composer represented by the French performing rights society SACEM (I have bigger concern over the implication of recognizing AI as a composer and what that could mean to the legal definition of an author under copyright law) and Endel recently became the first AI to land a major label record deal with Warner Music Group.

If AVIA is a composer and Endel is a recording artist, and they can produce massive volumes of content (WMG is releasing 20 albums by Endel this year alone), what does this mean for the quality and pace of human-created music?

The founders might be telling human music creators not to worry, but until I see a portion of the royalties earned by AI platforms being distributed to the humans whose works are used as source material for the machine learning processes, I believe the statement at best demonstrates a cluelessness as to how industrialization works or at worse the statement is blatantly disingenuous.