How Musicians Can Get Paid for Training AI

Startups like Sureel and SoundVerse are attempting to build technical and economic frameworks for attributing AI training data influence back to the musicians whose work shaped a model, rather than treating creative labour as a one-time, freely extractable input. The challenge is real and genuinely difficult: meaningful attribution requires causal inference, not just surface similarity, and any system sophisticated enough to be fair is also sophisticated enough to be gamed. The article is honest about these tensions while taking seriously the window of opportunity that still exists to shape industry norms before they calcify.