AI Could Cut Music Creator Earnings 24% by 2028
Music creators globally face a 24% revenue drop by 2028 due to AI disruption, according to a UNESCO report drawing data from 120 countries. Audiovisual creators aren't far behind with projected losses of 21%.
Music creators globally face a 24% revenue drop by 2028 due to AI disruption, according to a UNESCO report drawing data from 120 countries. Audiovisual creators face projected losses of 21%.
The Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report tracks a sharp shift in how creators earn income. Digital revenues jumped from 17% of creator income in 2018 to 35% now, but that growth gets wiped out as AI companies train models on copyrighted work without paying for it. Fathom Legal Managing Partner Ishita Sharma said the projections strengthen the case for recalibrating copyright frameworks, noting the debate has moved from abstract innovation to distributive imbalance when AI systems extract value from protected works at scale without proportionate compensation.
The legal fights are already playing out. OpenAI faces copyright lawsuits from authors and publishers, with a New York judge recently allowing key infringement claims to proceed in consolidated litigation. Google battles similar lawsuits from publishers over Gemini AI training. Meta and Anthropic won partial fair use victories in book-training cases, but those rulings don't settle the broader question of whether AI training constitutes fair use.
Sharma said existing fair use and fair dealing doctrines appear increasingly strained in the context of AI training and output replication. Those doctrines were built for human, case-specific transformative uses—not the wholesale ingestion of vast copyrighted corpora for commercial model development. For creators whose style or voice gets replicated, remedies remain fragmented and imperfect.
The skills gap makes things worse. Developed countries show a 67% digital skills divide among creators, while developing countries sit at 28%. Google.org announced a ₱115.88 million ($2 million) investment in Sundance Institute to train 100,000 artists on AI tools. The Creators Coalition on AI now has backing from more than 500 writers, actors, and technologists pushing for better protections.
Kini nga artikulo gisulat base sa report gikan sa Decrypt.
