Artistic Futures Brief #2: The Proof Problem
In music, the money doesn't vanish when someone steals it. It vanishes when nobody can prove it's yours.
This month's explainer is the clearest example: the cue sheet, one missing form that can strand your royalties across a dozen countries. And the same gap runs through the news. AI dominated music-rights this month, and every story circles the same question: once AI can absorb a song, who can prove it happened, and who gets paid? Germany answered in court, independent publishers are testing whether the proof can even be built, and South Korea already wrote the rulebook Europe is still debating.
Missing paperwork, unprovable use, money that never arrives. Same gap, which is the one we're building Artistic Futures to close.
30 countries
Your score can air in thirty countries and still leave your bank account empty. If you write for film, TV or advertising, your income was never streams. It comes from performance royalties: every time your work airs, the broadcaster pays a licence fee, and a share is supposed to reach you.
Supposed to. Between the broadcast and your bank account stands one document, the cue sheet. It lists every piece of music in a production: title, composer, publisher, timing. Collecting societies don't watch films, they read cue sheets. When it's missing or wrong, the royalties still get collected. They just sit unclaimed, because nobody can prove whose they are.
The Read
AI companies can't help themselves to songs (Complete Music Update)
For the first time, a major AI music company has been told by a European court that training on songs without permission is illegal here, whatever the US courts eventually decide. That shifts the ground from hoping platforms play fair to pointing at a rule that can actually be enforced.
A Munich court found that Suno breached GEMA's copyright on every count, including that the model had memorised songs and could reproduce them almost identically. Suno now has to licence GEMA's whole repertoire or stop using it. It's an early decision and Suno will appeal, but the direction is set.
One reaction from the discussion among composers and rights specialists stuck with us: a good start on a much older problem. Long before AI, this industry struggled to prove which work was used, by whom, and what was owed. AI didn't create that gap, it only made it too big to ignore. Worth keeping the celebration measured all the same. The strongest objection raised is that the court mischaracterised US fair use doctrine, which is the ground an appeal would be fought on, and a first-instance win in Munich sets a direction rather than a settled rule.
The whole AI licensing fight comes down to one question nobody can answer yet (Music Week)
Can a songwriter actually prove their work trained a model, and measure by how much? Without that, "fair compensation" is just a slogan. This is the first serious attempt by the independent side, rather than the majors, to put that proof in its own hands.
IMPEL and IMPF, two independent publishing bodies, are running a closed trial of Sureel AI's attribution tech, testing whether it can detect when their writers' songs were used in training. The honest part, which they admit themselves: nobody yet knows what it can and can't do.
South Korea built the AI disclosure system Europe is still arguing about (Music Business Worldwide)
While Europe debates how to handle AI-assisted songs, South Korea's largest copyright society just went ahead and built the rules, which raises a fair question: are they ahead of us, and should Europe be looking at this as a model?
KOMCA lifted its ban on registering AI-assisted songs, but only where a human led the writing, and only with disclosure of which parts used AI and which tools. Get it wrong and they can freeze royalties, claw back payments, or cut the writer off.
Cue sheets, explained
You don't have to wait and hope one gets filed. Put it in your contract: the production delivers a completed cue sheet to your society, and a copy to you, before final delivery. Producers treat it as compliance when it's written down, and forget it when it isn't. That one line is the difference between royalties that route themselves and royalties that vanish into an unallocated pool.
From Artistic Futures
Artistic Futures is a Creative Europe-funded project building tools so independent European creators can see where royalty and metadata gaps cost them money, and what to do about it.
The research is done. Nine co-design workshops across the consortium told us what the tool has to do and how it has to behave, and that is now the build spec. We're in development. The first beta arrives at the end of October. Screen royalties are one of the gaps it addresses, which is why the cue sheet is this month's explainer. Subscribers here get early access.
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Artistic Futures is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
