AIR Music

Before dancehall veteran Papa Michigan released his album So Many Roads in August, TuneCore turned down one of its songs as AI-made. He had recorded it with live musicians, and the album came out without it. You can upload AI music to Spotify in 2026 through a distributor, with the AI part declared. The checks on the way are where releases stop, and they catch human-made tracks too.

If your track has a few seconds of someone else's recording in it, you need permission to release it. That's true even if you never sampled anything yourself and the sample came inside a beat you leased. Without that permission, your distributor can reject the track, Spotify can take it down and hold its royalties, and YouTube's Content ID can send its income to whoever owns the original.

If you run a label, your catalog already earns on YouTube. Fans upload lyric videos, edits and Shorts with your artists' recordings every day. Without Content ID, the label sees none of that money.

If your label is moving to a new music distributor, the risk sits in the catalog. Deliver a release the wrong way and Spotify reads it as a new recording: the play count starts from zero, playlist placements drop, and your artists come to you asking where their streams went.

If you run a label, one artist's fake streams land on your account. Spotify charges the label or distributor that delivered the track, and distributors pass the fee on to the account the track came from. On a label account, that's you.

If you run a label and your music distributor isn't responding, the problem lands on you. Your artists see a release that missed its date or a track that disappeared from Spotify, and they come to you, not to the distributor.

Your song is protected by copyright the moment you record it or write it down. You don’t have to file anything for that. Getting paid for it is where the work starts. Every track has two copyrights, one for the song and one for the recording, and each one earns through its own organizations. In the US, that’s a performing rights organization (PRO), the MLC, SoundExchange, and your distributor. Each of them pays only the people registered with it, and signing up with one doesn’t sign you up with the others.

If you run a label, a release on the wrong artist profile lands on you. Your artist spots it, and since the release went out through your label, they come to you to fix it. With a roster, this can happen with any release, on any platform.

Every distributor here gets your music onto Spotify, Apple Music, and TikTok. The difference is the money, and what happens to it when you stop paying. Some charge a yearly fee, some take a cut of every stream, and some keep 15–25% of your royalties once you cancel.

If you’re an independent artist in the Philippines, you’ve probably experienced this moment: You upload your music. You click ‘Agree’ on the Terms & Conditions. And then it hits you: “Wait… did I just sign away my rights?”