The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music; The Atlantic, June 14, 2026

 Alex Reisner, The Atlantic; The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music

"The actual recordings that go into any model are a closely guarded secret—AI companies have claimed they are proprietary—but the number of songs is almost certainly huge, spanning genres and time periods.

As part of my series of investigations into AI training data, I recently discovered four giant datasets of songs that are being shared within the AI-development community. One has 12 million tracks. Another has 9 million. The two smaller datasets each have more than 100,000. They include hits from major pop artists such as Bad Bunny, Nirvana, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, and the Beatles. (The New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” is in two of the datasets.) Jazz artists such as Miles Davis, John Zorn, and Vijay Iyer are featured, as are classical composers and tens of thousands of minor artists across genres. The 12-million-track dataset, on its own, would take 91 years to listen to...

In an attempt to prevent their products from generating songs that duplicate existing music, AI companies implement detection software. But neither Suno nor Udio prevents users from generating songs in the style of real artists. Earlier this year, Sony found 135,000 AI-generated tracks attributed to its artists on various streaming platforms. Although it’s not clear exactly which AI tools were used to generate those tracks, the technology is already harming artists’ ability to make a living from their music...

usicians and labels have filed at least 12 lawsuits against AI companies for training models on copyrighted music. The music industry’s three major labels have sued both Suno and Udio, and others have sued Google, OpenAI, and smaller AI vendors. No rulings have been issued in these cases, but some of the labels have reached settlements with Suno and Udio...

On the Free Music Archive, the guitarist and singer Derek Clegg has been sharing his original, home-recorded songs for more than 15 years. Clegg told me he’s happy for people to put his music in the background of their personal videos, as long as they credit him. When people expect to make money from the use of his music, then they pay him for a license. More than 250 of Clegg’s songs are in the FMA dataset I found. I asked whether he would opt out of AI training if a mechanism for doing so existed. “Yeah, definitely,” he said.

What bothers Clegg most is that AI companies take people’s music without consent, and without acknowledging that their tech products are entirely dependent on musicians. “It just seems dishonest. It seems like theft,” he said. “There’s going to have to be a reckoning.” That’s his hope, anyway."