AI Music Needs Blockchain Infrastructure

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Opinion by: Dzmitry Saksonau, CEO of JGGL.

The music industry recently closed one of its most momentous eras in decades. Warner Music settled its copyright lawsuit with Udio in November 2025 and signed a licensing deal for a new AI-powered music platform.

Days later, Warner reached a similar agreement with Suno, the most popular AI music generator, with more than 100 million users and a valuation of $2.45 billion.

All three major labels now have licensing deals with the AI ​​platforms they sued just a year ago.

By Grammy Week 2026, the conversation had changed. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. admitted that every producer he knows already uses AI in the studio and called the AI ​​policy “the hardest part of my job.”

He is not the only one who shares that sentiment. Artists want to create with these tools, but they also don’t want their work to be mined without consent or compensation.

As AI becomes a default tool in studios, these deals expose cracks in attribution, ownership and compensation that licensing alone cannot fix. If music is entering an era of “open studio,” the industry needs solutions built into the very foundation of creation.

Licensing agreements do not adapt to what comes next

Licensing works when creation is centralized and outcomes are clearly defined. A label signs an agreement with a platform, the platform is trained on approved catalogs, and artists opt to have their voices and compositions used.

That model manages the present, but it does not manage the future.

AI-assisted music is fluid: remixes, iterations, and collaborations are constantly happening across tools, platforms, and communities. A single track can go through three AI models, two human producers, and a remix chain before reaching an audience.

The Suno-Warner deal has already exposed a rift. After the agreement, Suno quietly revised its ownership rights and terms. The language that previously told subscribers “you own the songs” is gone.

The updated policy now states that users “are generally not considered owners” of their results, even with paid commercial licenses. It turns out that ownership is the part that licensing agreements struggle to define.

The numbers make the problem of scale evident. Suno alone has 100 million users. Agreed deals cannot be negotiated for every creative interaction in that ecosystem. The model breaks under its own weight.

The real conflict has to do with attribution.

Much of the debate between AI and music focuses on humans versus machines when the real issue is something else entirely.

It’s not that AI is going to replace artists by any means. The problem is that no one can reliably track who created what or who should receive payment.

If you lose track of who created what, money will stop flowing to the right people. Once that happens, trust disappears, even if each tool is properly licensed.

We’ve seen a similar pattern when streaming became popular. Streaming gave people access to music and that part was good. The damage came from opaque value streams that left artists unable to track where their money went.

The same thing happened during the user-generated content fights of the 2010s. Every time music becomes more accessible without a transparent money trail, creators get burned.

The NO FAKES Act, reintroduced to Congress in April 2025 with bipartisan support from lawmakers and backing from OpenAI, YouTube, and the three major record labels, attempts to address some of this.

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The bill would establish federal protections against unauthorized AI-generated replications of a person’s voice or image. However, the legislation protects once the damage is done. First of all, it does not prevent breakdown.

Without transparent systems built into the creation process, openness will always feel exploitative to the people making the music.

Infrastructure can prevent disputes

Smart contracts can encode royalty splits into the song file itself. When a track is sold or streamed, payment runs automatically. A three-person gang with a 40-30-30 split receives those percentages instantly. There is no tag that holds funds for 90 days. There are no quarterly financial statements. There can be no dispute as to who owns what percentage. The transaction is recorded in a public ledger. Any collaborator can verify that their share of the royalties reaches their wallet.

The biggest advantage is the provenance. Blockchain allows creative works to keep their record of ownership as they move between platforms. When a track goes through AI models, remix chains, and distribution channels, that record travels with it.

The current system cannot do this. Metadata is deleted, credits are lost, and payments arrive months late, if at all.

Done right, this infrastructure enables what licensing agreements will never achieve: a creative environment where artists remix, build on, and share each other’s work without losing ownership along the way. Where fans have a real interest in the creative process and where artificial intelligence tools improve what artists create.

The window to get this right is closing.

AI-assisted creation has quietly become the default mode of music production, and the industry now faces a familiar choice. You can keep adding more rules to outdated systems, or you can rebuild the foundations of how music is made and shared.

The Suno-Warner deal is a good starting point, but it is not enough on its own.

AI is not the existential risk that the industry continues to deal with; the systems that try to contain it are. Licensing agreements are a good start, but they were never designed to carry this much weight. The industry needs an infrastructure that makes compensation as automatic and seamless as the creative process itself.

If music is truly entering an era of open studios, the industry must build systems that trust creators and make that trust enforceable by design.

Opinion by: Dzmitry Saksonau, CEO of JGGL.