Skip to main content
Michael Huppe

Michael Huppe

CEO of SoundExchange

Oct 2, 2026

10:36
And so is this a thing that should be labeled as AI? And And one of the things that I keep thinking about, you mentioned autotune, is in this case, is this really her using Suno as an instrument? Is her voice creation almost like an instrument? Or if you thought about sampling, it's an interesting space here, right?
10:56
Right.
10:57
Well, so I'm very aware of her.
11:00
That's a fascinating case.
11:01
And she definitely came at the right time and had that bidding war.
11:07
Good for her.
11:10
The fact that she wrote the lyrics, you know, in the music industry, lyrics and recordings are separated.

24 MINS LATER

34:46
It's disrupting our definition of these things.
4:27
So walk us through it.
4:29
In the music industry, I'm finding most things are more complicated than people might think at first.
4:33
But at a very high level, there's a couple ways AI can mess with the money flow, right? The most basic is the typical way that money is divided up on these services.
4:46
This isn't 100% true.
4:48
People are experimenting with different revenue models, you know, artist-centric and user-centric.
4:54
And we can talk about that on a different podcast.
4:57
But as a general rule... you know, all of the subscription money goes into one bucket and then all that gets divided among all of the streams of every recording that goes in a bucket.
7:35
Talk a little bit about the differences again, for those with no prior knowledge between an AI assisted track and maybe a fully generated AI track.
4:45
that make it onto Pandora? Does it make it onto SiriusXM?
4:48
It is making it into some of these streaming services, maybe not at the scale that you would expect yet.
4:54
But, I mean, there have been reports of, you know, whether it's 1% to 2% or 3%.
4:57
Sometimes people estimate that it's up to 10%.
5:00
There's also the ability to – streaming fraud is another big issue.
5:03
There are cases where people use AI tracks, set up bots around, and they siphon away payment from the – pipeline that would otherwise go to real artists and real record labels.
5:15
It's fraud, basically.
5:47
But will you get a percentage of AI-created songs? Is that what this, I'm just curious how you guys are jockeying

We value your privacy

We use cookies to understand how you use our platform and to improve your experience. Click “Accept All” to consent, or “Decline non-essential” to opt out of non-essential cookies. Read our Privacy Policy.