"Made With AI": Apple Music makes the machine-origin label mandatory for labels

Apple Music is making the labelling of machine-made music mandatory: labels and distributors will have to fill in transparency tags, and listeners will see the words "Made With AI" in the app itself.

The company's letter to industry partners, sent out on 20 August, is reported by The Hollywood Reporter.

The tags themselves are not new: Apple introduced them in March 2026, but filling them in was entirely voluntary. Now they become a requirement for everything newly uploaded to the platform.

Why Apple changed the rule now

In April, Apple Music vice-president Oliver Schusser publicly gave the figures that explain the hurry: more than a third of the songs uploaded to the platform are entirely machine-made — yet they account for less than half a percent of actual listening.

"Later this year, we will also make these tags visible to Apple Music users," the company's letter to partners says.

So the problem is not that machine music is being listened to en masse. The problem is that it enters the catalogue en masse — and without a label neither the listener, nor the algorithm, nor whoever counts the royalties can tell it apart.

Three platforms, three different answers

The difference is a matter of principle. Spotify and Deezer decide for the listener: machine-made material simply does not get where most people look. Apple instead leaves the choice to the person — but obliges the industry not to stay silent about origin.

For an independent artist this means one practical thing: if a machine did a material part of the work on your track, you will have to say so when uploading. If you do not, the distributor that put the track into the catalogue answers for it.

As ONE//FM examined earlier, the industry has taken a whole series of decisions on machine-made music in recent months — from outright bans to labelling.