In June of 2025, producer and songwriter Timbaland—who helped define the sound of the 2000s with a string of blockbuster hits—announced his next venture: signing an AI artist named TaTa. Hoping to spark what he dubbed “A-pop,” or artificial pop, Timbaland framed TaTa as the start of a new musical wave, one that could mirror the global rise of K-pop.
Videos by American Songwriter
“TaTa is my flagship,” Timbaland tells American Songwriter. “It allows me to create a whole narrative, a whole storyboard. Next thing you know, she’s in a video game, she’s here, she’s there—I want to be the musical Walt Disney. TaTa merch, TaTa glasses.
“There are a lot of artists who want to be anonymous, and I feel like this tool has allowed people to have a voice when they might suffer from anxiety,” he adds. “They have this talent, but they don’t want it displayed to the world. With technology like this, we have other ways to tell a story or build a lore.” (See more from Timbaland below)
The Velvet Sundown Controversy
A month later, a band called Velvet Sundown hit a milestone many acts dream of: a viral hit taking off on streaming. The track “Dust on the Wind” had earned over a million streams on Spotify when people began looking more closely at the group and their rootsy, classic rock sound, revealing that Velvet Sundown never actually existed. The band, and its music, was entirely AI-generated—and after further investigation and social media chatter, its Spotify profile now reads: “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence. This isn’t a trick—it’s a mirror.”
In the wake of the Velvet Sundown controversy, The Atlantic declared that “nobody cares if music is real anymore.” But conversations with professionals across the industry—from songwriting and production, to sync and live events—tell a different story. AI is here to stay, but its impact depends on where in the music business you look.
Producers on the Frontlines: Curiosity and Fear
Alex Kline, one of Nashville’s leading producers and songwriters, made history as the first woman to solely produce a Mediabase No. 1 country hit with Tenille Arts’ “Somebody Like That.” Speaking with American Songwriter, she describes an atmosphere that blends curiosity and fear over tools like Suno, which allows users to create original music generated from text prompts.
“This is just the beginning,” Kline says. “I can’t even imagine where AI websites are going to be in a year or a few years. It’s impressive, but it’s also frightening. I think it’s easy to picture a world where it comes for all of our jobs.”
Kline sees this era as a parallel to another paradigm-shifting moment, when the dominance of CDs fell to streaming, noting that very few people saw platforms like Napster as more than a fad at first. And like that chapter, our current laws are playing catch-up with the technology that is already available and experiencing wide adoption.
Lessons from the Streaming Era
Spotify launched in the U.S. in 2011 and had converted over 50 million paid subscribers by 2017, but the Music Modernization Act, the landmark piece of legislation designed to update copyright laws for the digital age, didn’t arrive until 2018.
When the MMA was signed into law, it yielded a database that issues licenses to streaming services and ensures royalties reach the correct songwriters and publishers. It also gave producers, mixers, and engineers a formal path to collect digital royalties and extended federal protection to recordings made before 1972.
While representatives from the music industry were hopeful that this would drag the industry’s royalty system into the streaming era, the MMA was racing to catch up to a world where technology had already rewritten the rules. Years later, debates about fairness and transparency still continue. Spotify’s average per-stream payout to rights holders remains between $0.003 and $0.005. A song racking up half a million streams on Spotify will only yield a few thousand dollars.
Just as copyright had to catch up with streaming, the law is now working to catch up to AI-generated music. Questions of legal direction are top of mind these days for Grayson Sanders, CEO of Chordal, a company he founded to simplify the sync business through technology that streamlines the notoriously complex process. He also notes that the distinction between machine-learning AI tools and the generative AI platforms is already being leveraged.
“On the machine-learning side, AI is already used every day by many companies to clean up metadata, tag music, analyze lyrics for searchability, and power recommendation systems that help music get discovered,” Sanders says. “Those are fairly traditional, straightforward applications, and most people agree they’re beneficial. They expand opportunities in meaningful ways.”
On the flip side, he believes that generative AI raises more questions about its role in the broader content landscape. “Right now, many large buyers and licensees have strict policies against licensing music that incorporates generative AI,” he says. “You might be able to use it for demo purposes, but for final submissions, you usually have to attest that no generative AI was involved. But that can be hard to verify.”
Because of these challenges, he sees liability as a primary concern. Brands that license tracks containing generative AI elements risk potential legal challenges from rights holders, especially since questions around training data and retroactive royalties remain unresolved.
Sanders sees the conversation hinging on whether or not training data will fall into the bucket of fair use. He hopes that it won’t.
“It would be disappointing to see AI companies scrape the internet and train on music without approval, then get away with just a slap on the wrist,” he says. “More likely, we could end up with rights holders negotiating retroactive licensing deals.” The concern is that negotiations in this arena are likely to benefit major labels and publishers, leaving independent artists, smaller rights holders, and songwriters at a disadvantage in an industry where they are already more vulnerable than others.
For Sanders, it all comes down to one major question: With AI here to stay, how do we build an equitable system where everyone who contributed to training data has the chance to benefit?
Can AI Replicate the Human Experience?
Eventually, though, many professionals believe that the AI frenzy will taper; while many of these tools can mimic music they were trained on, songwriters like Kline still see the human experience as an irreplaceable factor.
“Writing is so much about the human experience,” she explains. “Many of the best songs I’ve written haven’t just come from a play on words, but from someone’s experience in the room. An artist might come in having just gone through a breakup, and something they say will inspire what we end up writing that day. Or if someone has just fallen in love, that experience can shape the song. So much of writing is really about what’s happening day to day. Right now, AI can’t get into our brains and experience what we’re going through.”
It’s a mindset shared by Jenna Andrews, an artist, producer, and songwriter who has written for artists including BTS, Sabrina Carpenter, Lil Nas X, and Mickey Guyton. “AI entering the creative space has made a huge difference in writing music,” she says. “It can be a tool to get a vibe and feel for a song, but I don’t think it will ever replace the soul of human production. I definitely don’t think it can.”
Andrews says that AI is sometimes used to create demos, helping artists hear how a song might sound with their own voice, or tailoring it for a specific artist to help sell the demo. But she also believes that this type of process can strip a song of its emotional core.
Touring and Live Events: The Human Factor
Meanwhile, for Chris Thacker, Tour Manager for Dierks Bentley, daily operations have remained largely the same. He believes AI could eventually become a central part of his workflow, particularly when planning tours; booking agents might use it to optimize routing, while tour and production managers could rely on it to shape budgets using large datasets. He also sees a world in which promoters could use AI to predict crowd sizes by analyzing population data, historical ticket sales, or weather models.
Thacker expects AI to work its way into physical production. “It could become more integrated into the gear we use, helping to optimize technical systems in real time—for example, adjusting to account for variables like humidity, wind, or crowd density,” he says. “And once we have AI-driven hardware, like large commercial vehicles or robots, I could see it assisting truck and bus drivers in transporting our teams between cities, and even handling high-risk construction tasks.” Thacker is also of the more optimistic camp; he hopes that these kinds of changes might make for better daily life for a touring crew.
He envisions touring as a mobile construction project, with artists and crew as tradespeople in their individual fields. “Everyone brings a very specific skill set with them to achieve a clearly defined goal each day,” he notes. “While we can use AI to make better predictions and to increase efficiency, the largest part of our daily lives on the road, the physical labor, will remain relatively unchanged.”
The Bigger Picture: A Tool, Not a Replacement
Thacker’s view is reflected by people like Alyson Estes, the General Manager of Nashville’s Exit/In, who previously worked as the venue’s Talent Buyer and has accumulated 14 years of experience in concert promotion and talent buying. “AI isn’t going to lift gear or get you a drink,” she says, underscoring her belief that AI won’t ever be able to fully dominate the live corner of the industry.
After all, she spends every day among people who have to wear many different hats to make a live show happen. “The face-to-face interactions with marketing, audio, lighting, bartending, security, ticketing, and more happen on such a personal level that AI simply can’t replicate them,” she insists.
Her on-the-ground mentality goes back to a point offered by Sanders. “There’s a lot of fear about the future, and about AI replacing human creators in film or music,” he says. “But I don’t believe that’s where we’re headed. At our core, humans want to share, create, and bond through culture. That’s not something we’ll give up.”
He sees AI-generated content as the hot new thing—it usually looks good, sounds good, and it’s a competitive time-saver. “But over time, it will likely fade into the background, becoming just another creative tool,” he predicts. “What it won’t do is replace the 20,000 years of human history making music, performing on stages, and telling stories together.”
For Timbaland, AI Is Just Another Addition to His Toolbox
As the technology continues to expand, a multitude of artists are pushing back against AI in music. Timbaland isn’t one of them.
When looking at the visionary songwriter and producer’s body of work over the course of 30 years, the story that emerges is one of innovation and true creativity: He pioneered the idiosyncratic “stuttering” rhythmic style that became one of his sonic signatures. His work with artists like Justin Timberlake was chart-topping, acclaimed, and inescapable; his impact on the sound of the early 2000s was so notable that in 2007, Entertainment Weekly declared that “just about every current pop trend can be traced back to him.”
Timbaland’s creative toolbox is well-stocked, yet his voice stands out among those expressing their concerns around the explosion of AI. “It’s just another tool for creatives to be more creative than they already are,” he tells American Songwriter. “I’ve seen so many different eras of music evolve, from autotune taking its own place in the world, to all the filters and the things that digital brought to us.”
To Timbaland, AI is like the next iteration of the sampler: the tool that changed how music could be constructed by isolating different parts of existing recordings to then be tweaked and reimagined. He calls the ability to bring what’s in his head to life through the power of a machine “every creator’s dream.”
But with that enthusiasm is a steadfast belief that AI is not a replacement for his creative process. “It’s all about the human behind it—that’s still what makes something monumental,” he explains. “That energy is coming out of me; I’m just transferring it to something else, so you’re going to get Tim. It’s going to feel like Tim, because it’s me.”
For Timbaland, the rise of AI fits into a much longer arc of musical evolution. Like many others in the field, he saw the industry change its approach to marketing and promotion from the MTV era to the dawn and dominance of social media. He watched the shift from CDs to streaming transform not just how music was consumed, but how artists built their careers. Having carried a career through so many chapters already, he doesn’t see AI as a negative disruptor, but as an opportunity.
“If I look back at music as a whole and how it evolved to where it is today, all the doubts worked themselves out,” he says. “And I feel that way about AI. I believe all the doubts will work themselves out.”
This attitude isn’t just theoretical—he’s leaning all the way in with TaTa, the AI-generated pop star signed to Stage Zero, his new venture dedicated entirely to this frontier. She’s the company’s flagship artist, and it’s a direction he finds not just musically exciting, but full of potential for “live” performances and physical product launches.
“TaTa allows me to create a whole narrative and a whole storyboard,” he shares. “I want to be the musical Walt Disney…TaTa merch, TaTa glasses.” Working in this space, he says, makes him feel like Superman.
Still, he isn’t naive about what the technology could mean for the industry, and he acknowledges that there are people already writing music entirely with AI. However, he sees a future where taste will win out, and music that’s 80-90 percent human-made will continue to rise to the top.
Meanwhile, during this transition period, there will be output that’s mediocre, and offerings that are “silly,” but as creators find a balance between AI and human-informed, he’s confident that this type of process will inevitably become more normalized. Even Timbaland is leveraging Suno, like so many others, tweaking cadences and developing melodies.
But for now, it all comes back to the human touch. “Music is what’s in my soul—it’s my God-given gift,” he emphasizes. “The gift is in me, not the machine, whether I whistle it or type it out. It’s coming from me.”
In other words: new tools, same Tim.
For Songwriters and Musicians Like Tammy Rogers, the Human Touch Still Matters
AI has already become deeply embedded in the music industry. Some hail it as the next creative frontier, while others raise alarms—including more than 200 artists who recently signed an open letter urging tech companies to prioritize the humans behind the music.
The letter earned support from figures like Billie Eilish, Miranda Lambert, Jason Isbell, and Jon Batiste. For many musicians and songwriters, the impact of AI is complicated and lands somewhere between promising and precarious.
AI becoming intertwined with the creative process has raised plenty of hesitations for Tammy Rogers, songwriter, artist, studio musician, and member of The Steeldrivers. “As a session player, I know it’s costing musicians work,” she tells American Songwriter. “Writers can now get songs demoed for free, which takes away income from the players who used to record those demos.”
She’s concerned that what once served as a crucial training ground for emerging artists can now be done at the click of a button. “Over the years, I’ve played on thousands of demos, and I can see what a financial blow this will be for musicians—especially younger players, who once gained valuable experience by recording demos before working their way up to master sessions.”
Of course, it’s not without its advantages. She acknowledges the usefulness of AI for songwriters, highlighting the way it can revive forgotten material, make demos more affordable, and remove some of the financial barriers between writers and the pitching process. Rogers also has a balanced perspective on AI as a tool, noting that, for years, many writers have leaned on rhyming dictionaries or built tracks with drum machines. She sees parallels between these tools and the emerging generative programs entering the music-making space.
After all, digital tools like drum machines were once a frightening frontier of their own. However, Rogers saw human-led work win out then, and hopes the same will happen now. “I think AI can be an easy way out for some creatives, but it really depends on how it’s used,” she says. “It’s not my thing—I can always hear the difference in real instruments and voices, and I’ll always prefer that—but others may feel differently. People who are truly invested in the art of music and writing will still create it themselves.”
Rogers has been firmly planted in the roots community for the vast majority of her career, where blues, folk, jazz, and bluegrass tend to intertwine. These are genres that overwhelmingly demand a human touch, from the improvisational nature of jazz to the bone-deep emotion that characterizes the blues. There are some things that just can’t be replicated by a machine.
“I come from the songwriting and roots music community, where live performance is treasured,” she emphasizes. “I was around when string samples became so good that people thought live string sessions would disappear. They didn’t. In fact, real strings became even more valued. The same thing happened with drum machines; at the end of the day, nothing replaces a human being playing a real instrument.”
Her hope is that AI becoming mainstream will actually push more people towards live performance. She sees no substitute for “going to a show and seeing real people play and sing.”
As for the next generation, she remains assured that the drive to create something genuine will outlast a technological trend. “I’ll always advocate for learning to play an instrument as well as you can, and for supporting songwriters who write from a unique perspective,” she says. “That’s where true art lives.”
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