Sony, Universal and Warner Push to Ban AI-Generated Songs From Music Charts

Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and a group of independent labels are asking chart companies worldwide to disqualify AI-generated songs from rankings like Billboard's charts and Spotify's top-songs lists, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The labels want a new rule: only music that's primarily human-made should count. Any AI involvement in a track has to be demonstrably legal, meaning the AI tool that helped make it wasn't trained on copyrighted material without permission.

Sony and other major labels have already filed lawsuits against AI music generators including Suno and Udio, accusing them of training their models on copyrighted songs without a license or payment. This chart push is a second front in that same war.

The industry's stated concern is streaming fraud. AI slop songs, generated with almost no human input, are already climbing into the same charts that decide what gets promoted, played on radio, and paid out in royalties. If a track is a churned-out product of a prompt and a training set built on stolen music, the labels argue, it shouldn't be competing for the same rankings as a song someone actually wrote and performed.

The scale of the problem

Spotify was forced to delete more than 75 million "spammy tracks" from its platform last year, according to Engadget. Tens of thousands of AI-generated songs are reportedly uploaded daily to platforms including Deezer.

Google's Lyria Pro 3 model can now generate tracks up to three minutes long, complete with distinct intros, choruses and bridges, on command. The barrier to flooding streaming platforms with synthetic music has essentially collapsed to typing a sentence.

A parallel push on labeling

This isn't the labels' only move. The Recording Industry Association of America and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry have separately proposed a labeling system that would flag songs as fully or partly AI-generated inside streaming apps, giving listeners a heads-up before they hit play.

Apple has already rolled out something similar with "Transparency Tags," though whether a song gets tagged is currently left up to labels and distributors themselves, not enforced by Apple. That's a meaningful gap. A voluntary disclosure system run by the people with a financial interest in the outcome isn't the same as independent verification.

The other side of this

AI music tools are also giving independent artists with no label backing, no studio budget, and no distribution deal a way to produce professional-sounding tracks cheaply. A blanket rule requiring music be "primarily human-made" raises a genuinely hard question: who decides what counts, and how do you audit a song's creative process without turning chart eligibility into a bureaucratic nightmare?

There's also the copyright question underneath all of this, which remains legally unresolved. Sony's lawsuits against Suno and Udio haven't been decided. Whether training an AI model on copyrighted songs without a license counts as infringement, versus fair use, is a live legal question in U.S. courts right now, not a settled fact. The labels are asking chart companies to act as if that question is already answered in their favor.

Provable versus alleged

Proven: AI-generated tracks are entering major charts, and streaming platforms have had to remove tens of millions of low-quality AI uploads. Alleged, not proven: that Suno, Udio, and similar companies broke the law by training on copyrighted music without permission. That's the core claim in ongoing litigation, and no court has ruled on it yet.

The labels' request effectively asks chart companies like Billboard and Spotify to make a legal judgment call on lawfulness before any court has made one. That puts private companies in the position of umpires on a copyright dispute that's still working its way through the legal system.

What happens next

No chart company has announced new eligibility rules in response to this coalition's request. Billboard and Spotify haven't said publicly whether or how they'll change qualification standards. The RIAA/IFPI labeling proposal is also still just a proposal, not an adopted industry standard.

The Suno and Udio lawsuits remain unresolved in court, and their outcome will likely shape this fight more than any chart-eligibility rule the labels can lobby for on their own.