For decades, the royalty system has worked the same way. A song gets written by a human, registered with a performing rights organization like ASCAP or BMI, and royalties flow back to the writer when that song is performed or streamed. The system was designed around one foundational assumption: music has a human author.
AI just blew that assumption apart. And now someone is trying to build new plumbing for what comes next.
A new organization called AIMPRO has launched, pitching itself as “the first PRO designed to serve creators of generative AI works, allowing AI music creators to collect royalties for their work on a global basis.” Confirmed by Music Ally on April 29, 2026, AIMPRO arrives at the exact moment the industry is most desperate — and most divided — about what to do with AI-generated music at scale.
What AIMPRO Actually Is
For many decades, the music industry has relied on organizations like ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC to track public performances and distribute royalties. However, these systems were built on the prerequisite of human-only authorship. AIMPRO breaks this mold by offering a registration and licensing infrastructure designed to handle the complexities of AI-generated music, where authorship is often a collaborative result of human prompts, iterative edits, and model outputs.
According to its introductory press release, AIMPRO offers royalty registration, licensing, and distribution for AI-generated works, where authorship may involve prompts, edits, and model output.
In practical terms, an AI music creator — someone who uses a platform like Suno or Udio to generate a track — could register that track with AIMPRO, make it available for global licensing, and collect royalties when it’s used in advertising, sync placements, streaming, or public performance. The chain of title flows not from a traditional songwriter credit but from the human’s role in the AI creation process: the prompt, the iterative edits, the final selection and arrangement.
One of AIMPRO’s co-founders is Steve Stewart, a veteran music manager — including Stone Temple Pilots — as well as CEO and co-founder of music-tech firms Vezt and SongHub. The other is Joe Berman, who also co-founded SongHub with Stewart, with 25 years in publishing, sync and licensing experience.
“The music industry’s at an inflection point,” said Steve Stewart. “AI music is being streamed and licensed daily — yet there’s no infrastructure to ensure AI creators receive fair compensation. AIMPRO was built to close that gap.”
“If you’re an independent Suno creator, you need a place to register your work, and make it available for global licensing,” said Joe Berman. “AIMPRO provides this in an environment built specifically for the creators of AI music.”
How the Model Works
AIMPRO offers free basic membership, with AIMPRO taking a 15% fee only on collected income. The AIMPRO Marketplace is a live, searchable platform where commercial users — including filmmakers, advertisers, and media producers — can discover and license AI-generated tracks with a verified chain of title. A Pro tier subscription at $9.99 per month gives members enhanced access to the licensing marketplace and direct assistance from the AIMPRO team to secure placement opportunities.
There are limits. Creators can only be affiliated with one PRO at a time, meaning artists already registered elsewhere would need to switch to fully participate. AIMPRO is exploring ways to make parts of its licensing infrastructure available more broadly.
The practical ambition is a hybrid between three things simultaneously: a rights-management layer, a monetization layer, and a software-style subscription product. That is a difficult combination to execute — but it reflects the genuine complexity of the problem being solved.
The Crisis That Made This Launch Inevitable
AIMPRO did not emerge in a vacuum. It launched into a streaming ecosystem that is rapidly being overwhelmed by AI content — and is struggling to manage the fraud that comes with it.
Deezer, the global music experiences platform, is now receiving almost 75,000 AI-generated tracks per day, representing roughly 44% of daily uploads — more than 2 million AI-generated tracks uploaded per month.
Deezer reported receiving around 60,000 AI tracks per day in January 2026, up from 50,000 in November 2025, 30,000 in September, and just 10,000 in January 2025, when it first launched its AI-music detection tool. The growth curve is near-vertical.
The more alarming number is what happens to those uploads once they land. A majority — 85% — of streams generated by fully AI-generated tracks are detected as fraudulent and demonetized by Deezer. That fraud involves bots, not listeners, auto-playing AI tracks to siphon royalty payments out of the pool that should reach human artists.
According to a study conducted by CISAC and PMP Strategy, nearly 25% of creators’ revenues are at risk by 2028, which could amount to as much as €4 billion by that time.
Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier said: “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon and as daily deliveries keep increasing, we hope the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artists’ rights and promote transparency for fans.” Deezer is now licensing its AI-detection technology to other platforms — but Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music have not yet implemented comparable detection or disclosure systems at scale.
Where the Industry Stands
The reaction to AIMPRO has been sharply divided, and that division reveals a fundamental disagreement about what AI-generated music actually is.
AI music still sits inside unresolved debates around authorship, ownership, chain of title, platform terms, and commercial trust. Traditional rights systems were built around assumptions that a song had a clearly identifiable writer, publisher, and performer. AI music complicates all of that. AIMPRO appears to be betting that the market will not wait for every legal question to be perfectly resolved before building infrastructure for registration and monetization. That is both the opportunity and the risk.
Critics — particularly human songwriters and their advocates — argue that AIMPRO legitimizes a system built on music that was itself trained on decades of human creative work without compensation to those original creators. The training data debate between major labels and AI music platforms like Suno and Udio remains largely unresolved in U.S. courts, and AIMPRO is attempting to build a royalty collection business on top of a legal structure that does not yet fully exist.
Supporters argue the opposite: AI-generated music is already being streamed, licensed, and commercially used every day. Pretending it has no creator, no rights holder, and no legitimate commercial pathway does not make the problem smaller — it makes the infrastructure vacuum larger and the fraud easier.
The frameworks for identifying AI music, valuing it, and compensating it remain in flux. AI music is already participating in the same economic layer as human-created music.
AIMPRO’s bet is that it can help structure that participation before the chaos becomes permanent. Whether the traditional music industry will accept that bet — or fight it — is the question that will define music business policy conversations for years to come.
