Adrian Younge isn’t typically excited about performing cover songs. But earlier this year, the polymath composer and promoter behind the Los Angeles-based Jazz Is Dead record label and event production company felt called to put his stamp on a popular piece of music.
Younge arranged charts for the Midnight Hour band and singer Loren Oden to collaborate on a unique recording: a human cover of one of the first AI-generated hits.
“Through My Soul” is an AI-created soul song “performed” by faux female Enlly Blue that debuted in October on Billboard’s Emerging Artist chart. It has since racked up millions of digital streams. The YouTube video for the original “Through My Soul” has been viewed more than 11 million times.
On his first listen to “Through My Soul,” Younge, who already knew it was AI-generated, believed he could hear how the track had been assembled. He could decipher the influences that might have been fed into a program or chatbot to produce the music. The result did not resonate with him. While the technology’s capabilities were somewhat surprising, the song ultimately felt soulless.
“I support people exploring their art to find the true artist within,” Younge says. “When you’re just asking a computer to do it, it’s just sad.”
Though initially reluctant to spend so much time writing charts and recording an AI-made track, Younge took up the challenge to see whether he could bring life to the song. Younge told the musicians to be bombastic and dynamic, to “kick this song’s ass.” (In a short film about the process, vocalist Oden laughed at how many words the song tried to cram into each line.)
After the group recorded the track, which was released in April, they played it again at a live performance at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles. After that show, Younge realized that he kind of liked the song. In fact, he felt “it hit hard and was beautiful.”
Younge hasn’t just come around on “Through My Soul,” he’s made his cover of the song part of his set. When he tours through the Midwest and Europe later this year, he plans to include it in the setlist.
“If people want to bring AI into their process, hey, I’m all for it,” Younge says. “But if they’re asking an AI, asking a computer to write and perform an entire song, that’s just wack.”
The cover is also the most visible part of Played by Humans, an online effort by Jazz Is Dead and advertising agency TBWAChiatDay LA to promote a new digital standard that identifies music tracks that have been performed by humans—and to raise tricky philosophical questions about how AI should (or shouldn’t) factor in the future of music and creativity.
“This made me realize that when I’m writing music on a chart, that’s just a blueprint,” Younge says. “If a human is not expressing the blueprint, it’s not music.”
Played by Humans asks musicians and labels to visit the campaign’s website and upload their music for analysis by a tool developed by technologists at TBWAChiatDay. The tool looks for audio signatures commonly left behind by AI music generators. If a track appears to have been performed and played by humans, it is added to the Played by Humans database, and the submitting label or artist receives a stamp icon they can display online.
The longer-term goal is to establish that stamp as a widely recognized standard across streaming services, allowing listeners to identify, and potentially filter for, music made by humans. Its creators hope the icon can become as familiar as the boxed “E” used to mark explicit lyrics.
“Empowering humanity has been really our focus on this project,” says Nat Wilkes, a creative technologist with TBWAChiatDay who helped build the site.
According to streaming platform Deezer, as of late April 44% of uploads, or about 75,000 songs daily, are AI-generated, though few tend to break through and achieve widespread acclaim. Tracks like “Through My Soul” reflect just how prevalent this type of music authorship has become, and how the results are flooding music services. Additional Deezer research found that 97% of listeners can’t differentiate between AI- and human-generated music.
“This is a really interesting philosophical conversation that ultimately ends up an existential one,” says Jazz Is Dead cofounder Adam Block. “If we’re allowing the recognition of human-made art to be diminished, or minimized, where’s that going to take us? What’s that saying?”
In relatively short order, AI-generated music has gone from curiosity to commonplace to a deep concern in the music industry, which is struggling to balance artists’ rights, new technology, and economics while artificial intelligence tools become more widespread.
Popular artists and pop culture have increasingly embraced AI music. That viral “Puerto Rico” song on TikTok was created by AI, and hip-hop production icon Timbaland has been aggressively pushing AI music creation and a genre he calls “A-Pop.”
Suno, the Massachusetts-based startup behind one of the most widely used generative AI music tools, announced a $400 million funding round in June that valued the company at more than $5 billion. Since its founding in 2022, Suno’s rapid growth has placed it at the center of a wider debate over creativity and commerce.
In March, Billboard obtained a Suno pitch deck from last fall that claimed the platform was generating 7 million songs a day, roughly the equivalent of Spotify’s entire catalog every two weeks. Enlly Blue alone has released a half dozen full albums, along with singles and Christmas covers, since debuting last June. “Through My Soul” has also spawned covers by artists including Ye Soriya, Joan Noir Rivers, and simply Enlly, all of which also appear to be AI-generated.
At the same time, more than 1,800 artists are suing Suno and a similar startup, Udio, in a class-action lawsuit alleging that their work was used to train AI systems without compensation. Yet even as that case proceeds, once-skeptical labels and streaming services have begun courting AI music companies.
Udio has signed deals with Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, and Spotify announced an agreement with Universal that will allow users to create AI-generated covers and remixes by select artists.
Those developments have increased pressure on the industry to identify AI-generated music, though most proposed solutions still depend on voluntary disclosure. Spotify’s Verified by Spotify badge, introduced April 30, uses signals such as listener activity and off-platform data like tour dates to verify authenticity, while Apple Music debuted AI Transparency Tags in March. Neither system analyzes the music itself; both rely heavily on labels to provide the underlying information.
DDEX, an international standards body for digital music, has been working on coordinating a system of AI identification across the digital music ecosystem, says Mark Isherwood, who runs the nonprofit’s secretariat. He adds that efforts have focused on voluntary compliance and trust; if you submit a particular song to, say, a streaming service, you need to be up front with the degree to which it is created by artificial intelligence.
Played by Humans is trying a different approach. The campaign’s tool is built off software from a company called Pex that has been trained on a large collection of AI-generated music, and seeks out so-called sonic markers left by AI music software. Not an absolute standard, it aims to seek out 85% human-made content.
The idea is that while it may be infeasible to test every track being uploaded to a streaming service, artists could proactively seek a certification that they are the real thing and not AI-generated. So far, Played by Humans has scanned more than 1.6 million tracks, the bulk of them from the APM music collection, as well as 600 tracks from Jazz Is Dead’s own label.
The entire effort—recording, performing, and releasing a verification tool—raises pointed questions about how AI can and can’t influence human creativity, and argues that listeners have the right to know when they’re listening to something made by human musicians or machines.
What’s intriguing about this new, human-made version of “Through My Soul” getting performed and streamed (though significantly fewer times than the AI-made original) is that Younge and the rest of the musicians have no connection to the original artist. Existing copyright rules don’t require payment of royalties to AI-generated songs. And nobody has gotten in touch with the creator of the track, identified online as Vietnamese artist Thong Viet. It’s not clear whether the creator even knows the song has been covered, or whether he’s heard Younge’s version.
