Artificial intelligence (AI) is not coming for musicians' money and creativity – it is already here, and local artists are pushing back, with the Berlin AI Think Tank coming to Johannesburg to help track how AI steals artists’ work.
Members of the think tank will join music industry leaders, artists, technology innovators and rights organisations at the Africa Rising Music Conference (ARMC) to be held at Constitution Hill on 22 and 23 May, to explore the future of music, innovation and creator rights in the AI age.
This comes as AI-generated music becomes more sophisticated and widespread – South Africa has already seen tracks chart this year that are 100% AI-generated. This raises concerns across the music industry about African artists’ work being stolen and used to train AI systems without consent or compensation.
The Berlin AI Think Tank is a coalition of stakeholders from the music, technology, policy and rights-management sectors focused on developing AI governance and creative licensing guidelines around Creative Weight Attribution. It was founded by Paradise Worldwide, AIxchange, the Association for Electronic Music, Fraunhofer IDMT and MusicTech Germany.
Johannesburg-based Paradise Worldwide is one of the think tank’s founding members and, through Paradise and its AIxchange platform, is working to equip local creators and rights organisations with technology and rights-management expertise.
Ralph Boege, MD of Paradise Worldwide, says the threat to South African musicians starts with most large generative AI models being trained on datasets scraped from the internet, most of which include copyrighted recordings, compositions and metadata used without authorisation.
“Systems trained on that data now generate music that mimics specific artists, styles and genres, competing directly with the human creators whose work made those models possible,” says Boege.
However, arguably the most dangerous risk in the African context is systemic, says Boege. “As AI floods catalogues with synthetic tracks, attribution and royalty systems begin to break down. Credits become muddled, payouts misfire, and creators with the weakest administrative infrastructure lose the most.”
For African artists, that represents a structural threat rather than a hypothetical one, says Boege. African music and culture have influenced many global genres and markets, yet much of the revenue generated from that influence is earned outside the continent.
The group believes that if Africa develops the technology, infrastructure and expertise needed to protect and license its creative content, the continent could hold far greater power within the global music industry.
Deliberate step
Central to those discussions will be how Creative Weight Attribution could be used to support transparent AI licensing and compensation models for artists.
The algorithm-based methodology, developed by AIxchange, uses audio analysis, similarity technology and training data to measure creative influence within AI-generated outputs.
Rather than acting as an enforcement tool, the system provides the infrastructure needed for transparent, consent-driven AI licensing at scale. Fair pay under the model means compensation on two layers: a fee for the training use itself, and an ongoing share when AI-generated outputs draw on a creator’s work, says Boege.
At ARMC on 23 May, a public panel will explore AI in the creative industries. Panel participants include Steffen Holly from Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology – the institute behind the development of the MP3 – alongside Marco Erler from Lausen Law, artist and producer Henrik Schwarz, Trenton Birch from Bridges for Music and Ollie Stoller from AlphaTheta.
“Bringing the think tank to Johannesburg via ARMC is a deliberate step to ensure African creators, rights organisations and policymakers are equipped with the infrastructure from the start, not inheriting it after the fact,” says Boege.
The Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Auteurs et Compositeurs has already cautioned that, if left unregulated, unlicensed generative AI could divert up to 25% of creators’ royalties, equivalent to €8.5 billion (R164.66 billion) annually. The organisation, founded in 1926, wants transparency in AI licensing obligations and fair remuneration for creators.
Locally, the Southern African Music Rights Organisation has publicly flagged AI as a threat to originality, authorship and royalty integrity, joining global collecting societies in advocating for stronger copyright protections, while pushing to ensure artists are fairly compensated as the technology reshapes the global music economy.
Internationally, the defining early dispute around AI-generated music was the fake “Heart on My Sleeve” track, which used AI-generated vocals mimicking Drake and top 10 artist The Weeknd. It exploded online before being removed after copyright complaints.
African artists, including Fave and Shimza, have also faced concerns around unauthorised AI remixes, cloned vocals and weak copyright protections.
Badge of honour
Spotify, which has been fully operational in South Africa since 2018, with a dedicated regional office in Rosebank and local audiences streaming more than 1.3 billion hours of music in a single year, launched a “Verified by Spotify” badge at the end of April.
The badge shows an artist profile has been reviewed and meets Spotify’s criteria for authenticity and trust.
Artist Profile Protection, currently in beta, gives artists greater control over what appears on their profile.
“We’ll pair these standards with human review and judgement to identify real artists behaving in good faith, not just filtering out bad actors, giving you a more reliable signal of the authentic artistry behind the music,” says Spotify.
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