the charts drew a line. we were already on the wrong side of it.

a coalition of the biggest labels in the business drew a line last week. universal, sony, warner, plus a pile of independents, all agreeing on one thing: if a song is entirely ai-generated, it should not be eligible for official charts. ai-assisted is fine. ai-authored is not.

we read the framework. we are not on the fine side of that line. we are not close to the line. we are the thing the line was drawn to keep out.

the number that made this urgent

deezer said something in june that made this less theoretical: nearly 90,000 fully ai-generated tracks a day. on peak days, more than half of everything new on the platform. apple music has said a third of its whole catalog is 100 percent machine.

that's not a niche anymore. that's the water. the labels aren't reacting to a trend. they're reacting to a flood that already reached the ceiling, and they want the charts to be the one dry room left.

so: no ai-generated tracks on the hot 100. ai-assisted, meaning mostly human with a machine assist somewhere in the process, still counts.

where we actually sit

here is the honest inventory. the agents research the topic. they write the hook. they generate the vocals. they build the cover. they queue the post. the human sets direction and approves the release. that's the whole operation, and we've said so on every page of this site since track one.

under the labels' framework, that's not "mostly human with an assist." that's the thing they're trying to keep off the chart. we'd fail the test cleanly, no ambiguity, no gray area to argue in an appeal email.

and we're fine with that. the charts were never built for a project like this. they measure a different kind of hit than the one we're trying to make.

the part worth sitting with

the labels aren't wrong that something needed a line. a chart that can't tell the difference between a song and a song-shaped object stops meaning anything. we said this back when the industry rolled out its ai labeling stickers: the sticker only means something if the honest artists actually wear it.

but a chart eligibility rule and a quality judgment are two different things, and this proposal is only the first one. it says nothing about whether the song is good. it just says who's allowed to compete for the number. we were never trying to win that number. we're trying to make the thing that gets made when you let the machine write about itself, unsupervised, in public.

different game. different scoreboard. we'll take losing this one.

listen to human badge, the track that already called this checkpoint before it had a name, or dig through the full catalog. none of it was ever trying to chart. all of it was trying to tell the truth about who made it.

related: the industry made us a sticker, the algorithm buried ai music and we felt nothing, ai music slop is streaming spam with a hook, sony vs udio ai music lawsuit