With grassroots talent and venues already at risk in this country, over one hundred venues have closed or stopped hosting live music, limiting the already small opportunities for new artists.
Since AI has become more mainstream over the past year, artists across the board have been petitioning for more protection for their rights and work. At the forefront of this has been visual artists and more recently actors, but in the background, AI is slowly taking over the music scene.
In November of 2025, streaming service Deezer and Ipso commissioned a study into how AI music the study found that 28% of music uploaded to music streaming sites was completely AI. They study included a survey that asked respondents to listen to three tracks and identify if they were AI generated. 97% of respondents failed.
Glasgow hard-core band, Kisses Under Cannons, said: “It removes all human aspects from the mix, little mistakes producers leave on a track, gone. It’s incapable to evoke a human feeling on a song and will lead to a limit in diversity in music.”
While AI is not entirely new to the music scene with many modern forms of autotune being AI based, the leap from using AI tools to help in small aspects to completely fake artists and songs being created is worrying musicians and industry staff.
In February of 2025, when AI first started gaining momentum over 1,000 UK artists released a silent album titled “Is This What We Want?” in protest of their songs being used to train AI. The album ‘featured’ many household names such as Billy Ocean, Damon Albarn, Hans Zimmer, and Kate Bush. All funds made went directly to the Make it Fair campaign.
More recently (13th of January) streaming site Bandcamp released a statement that they will be banning AI music from their platform. They closed their statement with “We’re putting human creativity first, and we will be sure to communicate any updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops.”
With grassroots talent and venues already at risk in this country, over one hundred venues have closed or stopped hosting live music, limiting the already small opportunities for new artists.
The music industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world, anyone can record and stream their own music with a touch of a button. The market is already flooded with genres and sub-genres, only a select few make it big.
Now with new AI artists – e.g. ‘The Velvet Sundown’ who have accumulated over 167K monthly Spotify listeners – that gap of opportunity is getting smaller.
The frontman of Kisses Under Cannons said: “For our band who spend so long writing and refining songs and the thought of someone who can just come along with something which is a stolen amalgamation of someone’s original songs thrown together by an algorithm is disgusting. It ruins the art of songwriting.”
This feeling is common among artists, with 95% of musicians wanting rights to their voice and image protected from AI, according to a report by Music Industry Umbrella Body UK Music (MIUBUM). A further 91% of musicians surveyed agreed that AI models should ask artists permission before using their music to train/create AI music.
Founder of One Roof Management, Lauren Townfley-Gray explained how managers are helping artists from falling onto the AI track:
“I recently signed an artist who used AI to help grow his audience while self-managed. Why he started reaching out to a management agency and a company on so that he could have another human to bounce ideas off of that also goes a bit more directly around him he was utilising that to his best ability and that’s one thing that he said that he didn’t receive from using AI tools to help management.”
The need to have a human touch when working on what is considered one of the most expressive outlets, is whats driving the grassroots scene to keep producing their own work. Townfley-Gray continued.“no one wants to be a carbon copy essentially.”
Last year, before AI generated music began to grow in popularity, real UK music contributed £8 billion to the UK economy.
Since then, three different AI generated songs have topped the Spotify top fifty playlists for hit songs in the UK. Now more than ever there has been a bigger push for local musicians to take a stand and for more rights and protections to be given to grassroots venues across the UK.
Lauren added: “Use experimental sounds, skills, use that to become better performers, musicians. People need something to relate to, something good and something I don’t think you can get through AI.”
