A "human-first" label on a recording means little without a public standard and enforcement mechanism, according to Jeffrey Anthony, director of the Musical Form Institute. He argues that a checkbox on distributor upload forms cannot resolve disputes over human authorship.
Cynthia Zhu has argued that calling a recording "human-first" is an empty claim unless a verifiable definition and supporting machinery exist. She points to open-source software, where definitions were maintained outside the companies that benefited from the label, as a model. Zhu proposes adding a self-attestation checkbox to upload forms used by distributors such as DistroKid, CD Baby, and TuneCore. In her view, that checkbox would carry legal weight as part of the artist-distributor contract, and the enforcement layer could be administered at approximately zero marginal cost.
Enforcement and Verification Gaps
Anthony says that approach runs into enforcement realities. If a distributor rejects a customer’s human-authorship claim, removes music from streaming platforms, and bans the artist, the cost is no longer zero. It can require investigations, demands for evidence, public standards, an appeals process, and potentially expensive litigation.
He also notes there is no industry-wide consensus or federal regulation. Other distributors can accept the same music, allowing rejected artists to move to another service and undercutting the enforcement mechanism.
Certificate of Embodied Production
Before enforcement, Anthony asks what is actually being verified when a sonic object is labeled human-first. He says the Musical Form Institute has been working on this question through the Certificate of Embodied Production (CEP).
The CEP is not a voluntary label or a checkbox. It is a certification mark, currently pending federal registration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) under Serial No. 99559776. It certifies that sound recordings were produced without grid correction, pitch correction, or generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Anthony places the CEP in the same family as Certified Organic, Fair Trade, and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). A certifying organization publishes the standard, evaluates applicants, controls who may use the mark, and maintains procedures for enforcement, suspension, and revocation.
He clarifies that the USPTO does not certify individual recordings or endorse the CEP standard. The CEP is being built within the federal legal framework for certification marks rather than as another ungoverned industry label.
Where the Line Is Drawn
The CEP connects three processes that move authority over the final recording away from the musicians whose performances initiated it.
- Grid correction replaces musicians’ embodied expressions with idealized, machine-defined timing.
- Pitch correction replaces the pitch actually expressed by a singer or performer with a machine-defined understanding of perfect pitch.
- Generative AI produces musical material without an embodied musical act occurring at all.
The CEP draws its line at this transfer of authority away from the human act, whether to a machine-defined ideal of time, a machine-defined ideal of pitch, or a machine that produces musical material outside the historical unfolding of a situated human act. A human performance comes into being through a body acting in a particular time and place, with each musical decision following from what has occurred in relation to the moment.
Generative AI draws instead from a latent space outside historical time, in which all points of data exist simultaneously as available material rather than arising through that lived unfolding.
We argue that the take matters, that the smoke should, and needs to, point to an originating fire, and that the stakes are not on the register of aesthetics, but on the level of epistemology and social coordination.
Personal Experience in Recording and Analysis
Anthony says he arrived at this distinction through three lines of personal experience. He describes his early work as a session drummer in the late 1990s, during the transition from tape to Pro Tools. Recording drums on hundreds of records, he saw digital technology facilitate recording and democratize access for bedroom producers and independent studios. He also watched those tools shift from facilitating performances to rewriting them.
A common phrase among session musicians, he says, is "we have coverage." That means taking one base take and using the playlisting function in Pro Tools to swap in passages from half a dozen other takes, creating a Frankenstein track that is then subjected to gridification. The particular place, time, and relation of any one performance are flattened and replaced by a machine-perfect representation of what the musician is "supposed" to sound like. This, he argues, is why much contemporary music sounds perfect, placeless, timeless, and homogenized.
In 2004, Anthony became a music analyst on the Music Genome Project at Savage Beast Technologies, a small Oakland startup that later pivoted to online radio and became Pandora. He spent seventeen years there.
