The music industry is building the tech to hunt down AI songs
The music industry's nightmare came true in 2023, and it sounded a lot like Drake.
"Heart on My Sleeve," a convincingly fake duet between Drake and The Weeknd, racked up millions of streams before anyone could explain who made it or where it came from. The track didn't just go viral - it broke the illusion that anyone was in control.
In the scramble to respond, a new category of infrastructure is quietly taking shape that's built not to stop generative music outright, but to make it traceable. Detection systems are being embedded across the entire music pipeline: in the tools used to train models, the platforms where songs are uploaded, the databases that license rights, and the algorithms that shape discovery. The goal isn't just to catch synthetic content after the fact. It's to identify it early, tag it with metadata, and govern how it moves through the system.
"If you don't build this stuff into the infrastructure, you're just going to be chasing your tail," says Matt Adell, cofounder of Musical AI. "You can't keep reacting to every new track or model - that doesn't scale. You need infrastructure that works from training through distribution."
The goal isn't takedowns, b …