At a time when Americans are resisting the construction of AI data centers and registering their displeasure with generative artificial intelligence (AI), music executives Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine went the other way, endorsing the use of AI to create music in a recent New York Times interview. While Iovine mused that Big Tech would not have experienced such intense pushback from the public if they had only marketed AI correctly, Dr. Dre chose to belittle artists who refused to use AI in their creative endeavors. Dr. Dre told Jordyn Holman, “I don’t see it [generative artificial intelligence] as a threat. I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating.” He then compared using AI to using a drum machine or a synthesizer. “It’s a new tool for creativity,” he stated.
We should not be fooled by Dr. Dre’s out-of-touch AI optimism. AI is just a new way to steal from musicians, especially from Black artists.
Neither are the two music executives considering how AI companies like Open AI, Meta, Suno, and others are capitalizing and stealing from human writers, musicians, poets, and lyricists’ labor. Last year the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) found that several Big Tech companies scraped millions of copyrighted songs to train their models, all without compensating the original artists, similar to what is happening with authors in book publishing. Some companies have trained their models on unlicensed music, claiming “fair use.” According to The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner, Google fed its model 44 million tracks, while OpenAI’s music-producing program, Jukebox, consumed 1.2 million songs. However, the ICMP accused Big Tech corporations in a 2025 report of using copyrighted music without artists’ and labels’ consent. Their transgressions were so grotesque that the ICMP Director John Phelan called the unauthorized use of copyright-protected music, the “largest IP theft in human history”.
As a listener, historian, and academic of hip hop culture, I have learned that artists do not produce art in a vacuum.
Dr. Dre and Timbaland’s AI advocacy is colliding head-on with the music industry’s wide and deep history of capitalist exploitation of artists, especially its mistreatment of and theft from Black musicians. After World War II, as rock ‘n’ roll took root in popular culture, record labels catered to a racially segregated market, signing Black artists and selling their “race records” to Black audiences. Black artists often signed exploitative contracts, allowing labels to reap much of the profits. White artists like Elvis Presley famously took elements of Black pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll like Fats Domino, Big Mama Thorton, and Little Richard, and repackaged them for white listeners and mainstream radio. Pat Boone also enriched himself by covering Little Richard’s songs. Little Richard saw none of the financial benefits. He told Rolling Stone in 2023, “Those record companies paid me nothing…Nobody paid me a dime. All those hits.” Boone’s popularity increased during the payola scandal of the 1950s. The period when record labels paid radio stations to play their artists’ music featured disc jockeys like Dick Clark and Alan Freed, who insisted upon writing credit on Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” as part of an agreement to air the song widely.
Decades later, white artists, record companies, and their lawyers sued Black rappers and producers who sampled their work. Litigation against artists like De La Soul and Biz Markie led to the emergence of a cottage industry of sample clearances. Markie’s career was never the same after songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan sued the rapper over him sampling O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” in 1991. The sample clearance industry restricted hip hop artists’ creativity. It would be impossible for rappers to produce landmark “collage” albums like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High & Rising, or the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique.
Corporate capitalism took a bite out of Black radio in the mid-1990s with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Although the law intended to foster competition in the telecommunications industry, it helped facilitate the concentration of corporate radio, leading to the erasure of lyrical diversity and regionality in rap music, and making it more difficult for independent and more politically conscious artists to break into mainstream. While there would be some exceptions like Common, Rawkus Records artists like Mos Def (now known as Yasiin Bey), Talib Kweli, and Dead Prez, mainstream rappers who rapped less about politics like Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, Jay-Z, Will Smith, Eminem, Nelly, and 50 Cent garnered more radio play and even more sales.
Some major Black artists have lost out in the streaming era—De La Soul went years without garnering any revenues from their famed Tommy Boy Records albums. De La Soul balked at allowing their music onto streaming platforms after Tommy Boy Records, according to the rapper Posdnous, sought a 90-10 split in streaming revenues. Salt-N-Pepa sued Universal Music Group last year to acquire the rights of their master recordings. The pioneering Black women artists claim that Universal is preventing them from exercising their “termination rights,” which, in some music contracts, stipulate that artists’ rights to their master recordings revert to them after a predetermined period.
Although Big Tech companies are stealing music from artists of all backgrounds to train their models and programs, Black artists remain particularly vulnerable to this kind of theft. Some of the first AI-generated tracks to go viral were from Black artists like Drake, The Weeknd, and deceased artists like The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. According to the lawsuit filed by […], the plaintiffs claimed that Suno had incorporated music and lyrics from Black artists like gospel singer Mavis Staples, Michael Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Common, and Chief Keef.
Dr. Dre was no stranger to exploitation in the music industry. His NWA bandmate Ice Cube raised concerns about Ruthless Records founders Eric “Eazy-E” Wright and Jerry Heller underpaying him. In fact, the beef between Ice Cube and NWA revolved around the former refusing to allow Wright and Heller to exploit him. Dr. Dre followed Ice Cube out of the door after the lyrical exchange to help form Death Row Records with Suge Knight. Dr. Dre worked in a hostile environment marked by violence and intimidation from Knight and others who viewed force as a way to discipline the label’s workers. Dr. Dre left the label after recording landmark albums like The Chronic and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. Knight allowed Dr. Dre to leave for a price: that he give up his financial stake in the record label and his master recordings, which included The Chronic.
While AI can gobble up an infinite amount of music and audio sources, it does not possess the dynamism of humanity—our feelings of love, joy, disillusionment, fears, and anger
Now that Dr. Dre is decades removed from the violence of Death Row Records, he and other music executives stand to benefit from AI’s theft from Black artists. Timbaland’s “AI-focused entertainment company,” Stage Zero, is co-founded by Timbaland, Rocky Mudalair, and Zayd Portillo. The company would use AI to build “artist” digital entities like TaTa and train them to become a “living, learning, and autonomous artist built with AI.” The popularization of “AI artists” and companies that advance the promise of AI music production leave music producers and executives like Dr. Dre well-positioned to profit by paying real, human artists less for their talent and creative labor.
While some hip hop artists like Dr. Dre chastise others for not embracing AI, others have criticized its use in and outside of music. Tyler, the Creator has consistently condemned generative artificial intelligence, especially the ways in which it facilitates mass surveillance. Ice Cube has threatened to sue anyone who uses his voice to train AI platforms whereas DJ Quik (who has criticized Dr. Dre in the past), called it a “total violation of culture.” Grammy winner SZA strongly criticized tech companies developing AI models and other artists invested in this technological theft. After discovering that 238 of her tracks were used to train AI models, she said of artists who supported AI, “Your [sic] disgusting and there’s NOTHING YOU COULD EVER SAY TO ME TO MAKE THIS OKAY…” She then criticized Diplo (a DJ who has faced accusations of cultural appropriation) for his AI investments.
As a listener, historian, and academic of hip hop culture, I have learned that artists do not produce art in a vacuum. Rappers, especially, construct soundscapes from intentionally engaging the past, whether it is De La Soul sampling Schoolhouse Rock or Madlib sampling Blue Note’s esteemed jazz catalog. Yet, most importantly, these artists bring their lived experiences to bear on these sources and their instruments to produce music that reflects their lives and/or interprets the world around them. While AI can gobble up an infinite amount of music and audio sources, it does not possess the dynamism of humanity—our feelings of love, joy, disillusionment, fears, and anger—nor can it filter artistry through the personal perspectives and understandings of personal and political events to construct musical compositions that capture the moment and capture the zeitgeist. And if AI reaches the point of “recursive self-improvement” or “superintelligence,” that AI researchers expect, then AI “music” could be devoid of the mistakes that also captures the humanity in art. Gone will be those “perfect mistakes,” that can define great music like the off-kilter nature of some of RZA’s earlier productions.
While companies like Suno and rap producers like Dr. Dre and Timbaland might refer to AI tools as mere instruments, these programs decontextualize music from the most humanist aspects of music making. AI programs do not compose music out of lived experience. It also circumvents the human labor involved in music creation. Of course, contemporary musicians have access to more sources of music than ever before because they can rely on thousands of digital files, various music and video streaming sources, and the latest production software and hardware to create more polished sonic art. Yet, human musicians will never be able to listen to and process all the music created. Our fallibilities and limitations present artists with choices in how they will produce music and those choices are what drives musicians’ style and innovation. Another aspect of AI that should turn off artists, especially those who care about authenticity, is the ways in which it could further flatten, or standardize, music, generally, as these programs will likely draw from the same audio sources to produce music.
Musicians and artists have done more than just spoken out against AI. Some have turned to litigation. Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Jason Isbell and others, including David Lowery, Guy Forsyth, and Eduardo Calle, filed a class action lawsuit against Suno in September. In the suit, they claimed that Suno “appropriated and commercially exploited” their identities and styles in the training of their model without their consent. “It operationalizes and monetizes that data through its name-indexed platform which dilutes the commercial value of musicians’ identities,” the complaint states.\
As the collective anxieties around generative AI’s potential ability to extinguish human life and calls for more federal guardrails circulate in public discourse, the need for legislative regulation is more evident. Legislators from both parties have proposed bills aimed at protecting artists from AI exploitation. The Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks (TRAIN) Act allows copyright owners the ability to read records for training AI models while the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe (NO FAKES) Act would prevent AI companies like Suno from allowing users to utilize models that could replicate creators’ voices. The Creative Rights Ensuring Artists’ Technique and Originality Are Reserved Act (CREATOR Act) protects visual artists from AI replication.\
However, as Congress’s inability to pass meaningful legislation suggests, it will be up to artists to continue to organize collectively to fight against AI exploitation. The American Federation of Musicians organized a rally in Times Square in March for AI protections and fair pay. The AFM is also suing Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Atlantic Recording Corporation for licensing their members’ music catalogs to Suno and Udio. Musicians could look to the 2023 Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) strikes as a model case in how artists mobilized around AI as a central issue. The writers won a contract with extensive guardrails designed to protect workers from obsolescence, requiring studios to outline explicitly how AI would be used without eliminating human labor. The contract establishes worker agency: a studio cannot force writers to use generative artificial intelligence. Their contract also ensures that writers get full credit and compensation if studios provide writers with AI-generated drafts. One could imagine how AI might create stronger bonds of solidarity among artists across industries, similar to how the fight against AI data centers has brought together a politically diverse opposition including Democrats and Republicans and left and right populists like Senator Bernie Sanders and rightwing nationalist Steve Bannon.
While unions can accumulate leverage against record and tech companies by organizing artists and marshalling financial and legal resources, unaffiliated artists can also rely on building local and regional collectives and coalitions. Musicians and artists can partner with activist organizations to raise awareness around the connections between AI exploitation, the streaming economy, and the ways in which tech companies might seek the displace artists. In her analysis of the rise of Spotify and the streaming economy, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly writes about local artists forming collectives like Catalytic Sound who launched their own streaming service.
When it comes to keeping music creation as human as possible, it will be important for musicians and artists of all kinds to continue to collaborate and support one another. We should continue to work on music together, because no matter how hard tech oligarchs try, no machine can replicate the process of the human creation of art. One or many creative humans, especially due to our limitations, are more creative and more valuable than any single chatbot or AI platform. But listeners and non-musician activists also have a role to play in supporting human musical creation, through demanding more accountability from streaming services like Spotify (i.e. AI labels), refusing to stream and/or pay for AI-generated music, and to continue buying physical media, attending concerts when they are affordable, and to help create and protect spaces where artists can create.\ \ Dr. Austin McCoy is the author of Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age, a book that explores how De La Soul defined a new era of hip hop as well as American and Black culture. He is an assistant professor of history at West Virginia University, specializing in African American History, labor history, social movements, and hip-hop culture. His work has appeared in numerous outlets including CNN, TheBaffler, TheWashington Post, Black Perspectives, and Truthout. He lives in West Virginia.