This June, IFPI sprang into action. The trade organization for the recorded-music business around the world is best known for its annual Global Music Reports, which track annual economic growth and development for the industry by country and region.
But that month, it launched the first of three initiatives intended to tackle issues it sees as critical to the health of the global business: tagging and identifying AI-generated songs on streaming services; disqualifying AI-generated songs from its 60-plus international charts; and combating streaming fraud.
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The measures were a relatively rare foray into consumer and business practices for the organization, which traditionally spends the majority of its efforts on government lobbying for legal protections for the creative industry and infrastructure support for the industry in developing regions. But for Victoria Oakley, who became CEO of IFPI in April 2024 after a decades-long career in British diplomacy and corporate consulting, the rapid advancement of technology, particularly AI, has made such industrywide consensus-building essential.
“I think music at this period in its evolution, with the challenges and opportunities that it’s facing, the real mix between tech, creativity, business and government, is a complex and really important blend right now,” says Oakley, who spent 18 years in the British Foreign Office before stints advising companies like Google, Apple and McDonald’s prior to IFPI. “I didn’t want to go to a trade body that argues about a press release that nobody really wants to issue. I wanted to come and do lobbying and advocacy and storytelling for an industry that I think matters.”
This year in particular, the music industry has confronted challenges that teeter on the existential, none more so than AI, which both offers huge creative potential and very real risks to the streaming business model and trust of consumers. And while the broader AI conversation is much bigger than music, Oakley is determined to make sure the sector doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. “In the regulatory and political world, I think music is a sector that’s beloved but not particularly thought about or understood, and that’s because we haven’t told our story,” Oakley says. “But we’re now at a time where AI is not coming; it’s here. And we need to be able to use AI as an opportunity for music, but also we need governments to help us build the right systems and guardrails so that music can continue to thrive in a Gen AI world.”
Since you took over, AI has been a major focus in many different ways. It is a gigantic topic, of course. What are some of your major concerns there?
I think having either this fear or this binary sense of what AI means for music or for the music industry isn’t very helpful. I think what’s quite impressive about music is we’ve got to grips with AI quite quickly. [The record industry] actually has figured it out, knows a lot about what it wants to do with AI and how it wants to use it. But also how [music] needs to be protected, and how the way that the industry and the ecosystem works — and [the way] that the money moves around in order to have a thriving, sustainable industry —needs to be protected. So, kudos to leaders of record labels for getting to grips with it, moving toward licensing.
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The concern is there are too many conversations still in governments that don’t particularly understand the music ecosystem and how it works, that are proposing legislation that they think will be fine, but is actually throwing creativity entirely under the bus. The most live example of that is in Australia, where we have a government that appears to be entirely listening to the promises and the threats of a number of AI companies, saying you absolutely have to throw copyright out, which essentially means throw out the basis for how creativity can work and people across the creative sector, not just music, can make their livelihood from their creativity. “You have to throw this away; it doesn’t work. We can’t possibly come and invest in your country unless you do this.” And it’s ludicrous. We all know there are solutions. We’ve all seen lots of governments grapple with this and either find a way through or step away from the exceptions that Australia is considering. So that is my worry: that governments risk jeopardizing their own creative sectors and culture, and all that can come from that that matters to us as human beings.
How did you develop the principles for your streaming fraud initiative, and what are you hoping to accomplish?
We start from the principle that streaming fraud is dumb and bad and damaging everyone involved, whether you are an artist or a fan or a record label or, frankly, a DSP. Right? It’s just rubbish. So, what are the ways that we can fix that? If there was one single easy answer to this, then we’d have fixed it ages ago because we’d all yell at the one guy until he fixed it, and there we go.
But the point is that there is a role for multiple stakeholders across the streaming value chain. So what we’ve tried to do is identify what are the measures that all of those players could and should put in place. Some of which are quite basic: know-your-customer type things. Some are about good vetting, and then some are about really good data sharing, because we think there’s a whack-a-mole problem here as well, where fraudsters rock up somewhere, you make it difficult there and they go somewhere else. So our strategy is really about increasing friction and making it more difficult for fraudsters to succeed.
How do you do that?
I think it’s too easy to make money from streaming fraud. So if you increase friction, they will say, “Oh, this is hard work now, not for me, thanks.” And so we’ve been looking at all of the places where you could make it more difficult. Whether that is about accessing a distributor or platform in the first place, securing the revenue or being able to jump easily from one place to another and not hide, as it were. So that’s how we designed the principles across record labels, really saying what do we think we can see in the system which causes the problems.
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What we’ve moved into now, though, is trying to road test that with others. So our first wave is with distributors, and I don’t want to simply tell them what to do. We also want to have a conversation with them about what they think. Most distributors don’t want streaming fraud in their business, either. So a healthy exchange that says, have we come up with the right things? Are these the right principles? What else? What more? What different could we do? And then, how do we move toward compliance where more and more players are living up to those principles and ensuring that they’re applying them, but also then continuing the conversation. What more might we need to do?
How does this differ from or dovetail with other anti-fraud initiatives that the industry has rolled out in the last couple of years?
This one is an attempt to say, “Here are a set of measures that all of us could and should be taking.” I haven’t seen anything quite like that before that has this sort of collaborative approach. We’ve been in conversation with the [Music Fights Fraud Alliance] throughout, which is the organization set up a few years ago, to try and have this conversation. They have been looking at a number of measures, and they’ve been looking at some things that we haven’t looked at, like artist education about not accidentally falling prey to some of these services that you think are going to benefit your career, but are actually offering fraud, and we’re not particularly working in that space. This is quite focused on very practical steps that distributors could take. There is a piece of work to come on what other practical steps that DSPs could take. We’ve started with the distributor piece because that is the gateway in, but this doesn’t all sit with distributors alone.
What role do DSPs have in this?
I think there’s some interesting stuff about thresholds and volume and identification of a single economic actor, for example. I think DSPs are doing lots of things, and they’re looking for different red flags that might imply anomalies that merit investigation, although not automatically fraud. Are we all applying the same flags? Are we all defining the threshold in the same place? Are there other things that we could collectively look out for? Is there a case for doing any of this more collectively or in a more standardized fashion? We’re still working on what we think that looks like, and our intention is to have the same sort of approach. Inviting DSPs to join us on that journey, have that conversation with us and then at some point linking the two, that will make a difference. And then making sure those are aligned, because what I’ve experienced until now in the industry is a bit of finger-pointing. The DSPs point at the distributors, the distributors say it’s the DSPs. Then it’s, “If only the record labels did this” or, “Actually, it’s that kind of distributor versus this kind of distributor.” And as long as we’re all blaming one another, we’re allowing the fraudsters to have a free ride because we’re busy shouting at ourselves.
Classic music industry.
Not the only industry.
Are you working to ensure compliance, or is this more about recommendations on how to police yourselves?
We’d like to move toward a form of compliance. I think that’s super important, and I think I would almost like accountability more than compliance. They’re only slightly different concepts, but it’s an important difference in tone. You could have a centralized audit function where somebody is acting as the global policeman, and you can only be considered compliant and have the badge if you adhere to all of these things. I don’t think that’s IFPI’s role for now. Nor do I want it to just be a piece of paper where everybody says, “That’s marvelous.” So we think there’s something in the middle that comes partly from this collaborative process and the conversation that’s probably about self-audit, but probably a pre-agreed, systematized self-audit.
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We think this exchange of views and trying to improve together and come up with the other things that we could all be doing is probably more useful than yelling at the person who’s made the least progress so far. But let’s see. I think we are on a journey to compliance, so I don’t think we just leave it as a kind of lovely, fluffy announcement out in the air. But I’m not yet at, “Vickie Oakley is the global policeman and gives you a sticker because you’ve done all your homework.”
You mentioned the whack-a-mole issue, which I think is a very big component of this. But also the announcement did not include companies like TuneCore and DistroKid and OneRPM. Was there a reason that some of those DIY, single-fee upload distributors were not included in the announcement?
We made the announcement with a number of distributors that we knew and were working with, and who’d come on board to help us shape it. I’ve since had conversations with around 30 more distributors. My phone was ringing off the hook, metaphorically, with distributors who wanted to understand it, add things to it, offer a view, get on board, all of that. So we are now working our way through talking to literally any distributor who’s interested, whatever size or shape.