Key highlights
- New audio tools always trigger the same cycle: outrage → curiosity → normalisation → taste shift.
- The difference now: AI can imitate identity (voice/style), not just correct pitch. MeitY+1
- The smarter debate is about permission, disclosure, and royalties, not moral panic. Press Information Bureau+1
Every decade gets a technology that people call “the death of music.” Auto-Tune was one. Sampling was one. Even multi-track recording was once treated like cheating. Then audiences adjusted, and taste quietly rewired itself.
AI songs are entering the same tunnel — but with one new weapon: imitation. Auto-Tune changed pitch. AI can changepersonality: your favourite singer’s tone, your favourite rapper’s cadence, your favourite composer’s mood. That is why the backlash feels sharper. It’s not about sound quality. It’s aboutownership of the self.
In 2026, the myth is: “AI songs will replace artists.” The reality is uglier and more boring: AI songs will flood discovery feeds, and artists will compete not only with other artists — but with infinite cheap variations of familiar styles. The question becomes:Can your attention still recognise a human hand when the machine has learned human fingerprints?
The policy direction is already hinting at what a reasonable middle might look like: stronger standards for synthetic media labelling and traceability, so audiences can at least know what they’re hearing.MeitYAnd on the rights side, India has initiated structured work on the AI–copyright interface, which matters because music is not just art; it’s an economic chain of authors, performers, producers, and platforms.Press Information Bureau+1
If you want a clean “fact-checker” stance:
- Myth: AI is automatically unethical in music.
Reality: Unethical is using someone’s voice or catalogue without permission, or hiding synthetic work as human work. - Myth: AI kills originality.
Reality: AI kills scarcity. Originality survives when creators build context, story, and taste — things algorithms mimic poorly.
Official reference: MeitY proposed approach to synthetic media labelling + DPIIT AI–copyright work
