Every generative AI music licensing deal signed in 2026 has been opt-in, which means the default setting for your catalogue is out. The harder question for an independent artist is who is actually holding the switch.
Three deals, one common clause
The pattern has held all year:
- 20 January 2026: Merlin, the licensing body for independent labels, signed an AI training deal with Udio. Participation is strictly opt-in for members.
- 4 August 2026: Merlin signed with Spotify for its AI-powered fan covers and remix tool, again as an optional feature. Merlin CEO Charlie Lexton called Spotify’s respect for member rights “exemplary.”
- 12 August 2026: BMG licensed more than three million songs and recordings to Suno, from will.i.am to Paul Simon, with artists and songwriters required to opt in.
Nobody is being swept in automatically. That sounds protective, and it is. It also means the money only reaches people whose rights already sit inside an organisation with a seat at the table.
Who holds your switch
Merlin represents independent labels across more than 70 countries and accounts for roughly 15% of the global recorded music market, according to its own Spotify announcement. That is a real bloc, and it can register an election on a member’s behalf.
BMG can do the same for its signed artists. Kobalt did the equivalent for its publishing clients earlier this summer.
A self-releasing artist delivering through a distributor that is not a Merlin member sits in none of those pools. There is no counterparty negotiating for them, and no interface where a yes or a no gets recorded.
The EU turned “no” into a filing requirement
The AI Act’s Article 50 transparency rules became enforceable on 2 August 2026. Music Business Worldwide’s breakdown of what it means for the music business sets out the parts that matter to rightsholders:
- Generative systems must mark output so it is machine-readable and detectable as AI-generated. Systems already on the market have until 2 December 2026.
- Model builders must respect Article 4(3) opt-outs under the EU’s 2019 Copyright Directive. TDM means text and data mining, the legal category that training scrapes fall under.
- Builders must publish training-data summaries on a Commission template, which finally gives rightsholders a document to read.
- Penalties reach 15 million euros or 3% of worldwide annual turnover.
Reserving TDM rights is a machine-readable declaration, not a press statement. It has to live somewhere a crawler can parse.
Suno narrows the export valve on 3 September
From 3 September, Suno caps downloads at 20 a month on Pro, 60 on Premier, and seven lifetime on free accounts, per Music Business Worldwide. Suno says the change makes it harder for bad actors to mass-export music, and is pairing the caps with watermarking and fingerprinting users cannot strip.
Read that as a distribution story. The upload volume arriving in aggregator ingest queues came from somewhere, and the tap is now being narrowed at the source rather than at the DSP.
What an independent should sort out before December
- Ask your distributor, in writing, whether it is a Merlin member and how opt-in elections are collected.
- Reserve TDM rights in machine-readable form on any site or store you control.
- Keep AI-involvement disclosure accurate in your delivery metadata. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the standard that carries those fields from distributor to DSP.
- Do not assume silence counts as refusal outside the EU. Most markets have no equivalent of Article 4(3).
The consent layer for AI training is being built right now, and it is being built inside rights administration rather than inside artist dashboards. For distributors, including InterSpace Distribution, the deliverable is unglamorous: record the election, carry it in the delivery, and show the artist exactly what was sent.
Related reading: Spotify and Kobalt Sign AI Licensing Deal for Covers and Remixes, Beatport Bans Fully AI-Generated Tracks, and German Court Rules Against Suno in GEMA AI Copyright Case.
