Standing Up for Humans in the Music Industry: A Conversation with Lili McGrady

Lili McGrady, Humanable (USA)

The theme for World IP Day 2025 is IP and Music. The theme highlights how creativity and innovation, backed by intellectual property (IP) rights, keep a vibrant, diverse, and thriving music scene that benefits everyone, everywhere. One key conversation taking place right now within both the music and IP communities revolves around the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI) on the music industry.

This topic will be explored in a session during INTA’s 2025 Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, USA, titled The Business of Music: IP, AI, and the Future of Creativity. The session, taking place from 10:45 am to 11:30 am on Sunday May 18, will include presentations by U.S.-based musician Carter Brallier and INTA Past President J. Scott Evans (Stobbs, USA) and feature a musical performance by country music artist Kristina Murray. It will be moderated by Lili McGrady of Humanable (USA).

Ms. McGrady is well-placed to lead the discussion of this topic. She co-founded Humanable in September 2024 and now serves as its president. The company’s aim is to provide a means for musicians to prove that their music is made by humans for humans. It does this by certifying each piece of music and issuing a license to use the Humanable trademark on a record album cover and promotional material.

Musicians and songwriters generally earn copyright royalties whenever their music is performed, downloaded, or streamed. According to the industry body IFPI, music industry revenue doubled to US $29.6 billion between 2014 and 2023. Much of this revenue is invested in developing future talent; IFPI says that record labels’ investment in A&R (artists and repertoire) and marketing reached an all-time high of US $8.1 billion in 2023.

As Lauri Rechardt, Chief Legal Officer, IFPI, wrote in a recent article for WIPO Magazine to mark World IP Day 2025: “Creators across sectors use different AI tools to assist in creative processes. However, while artists’ use of AI tools should not disqualify the resulting works from protection, solely AI-generated outputs do not, and should not, enjoy protection under copyright laws.”

The rise of AI-generated music is therefore a significant concern for the music industry, as listeners may not be able to tell whether music has been generated by computers or by humans—and they may be duped into listening to AI-created music, resulting in creators missing out on royalties. According to a recent poll conducted by Whitestone Insight for industry body UK Music, 83 percent of people agree that if AI is used to generate a song, then that must be clearly labeled.

That is where Humanable aims to play a role. The idea emerged after Ms. McGrady moved to Nashville, Tennessee, USA—the home of country music—in 2023. A graduate of the Central School of Speech and Drama at the University of London, with a degree in playwriting and theater education, she soon got to know many local musicians, and says she repeatedly heard their concerns about the growing use of generative AI in the music industry and the threat it posed to creativity and to musicians’ incomes.

Given her family connection with trademarks—she is the daughter of trademark attorney and long-time INTA member Paul McGrady (Elster & McGrady, USA)—Ms. McGrady soon realized that trademarks could play a role in authenticating human-made music. Before long, Humanable was born, and already, more than 5 million songs have been certified.

In this interview, she explains more about the growth of Humanable, the role of generative AI in the music industry, and what to expect at the INTA Annual Meeting session.

How big a problem is the use of generative AI in the music industry?
It’s already taken a big chunk of royalties. It looks like in the next couple of years well over a quarter of royalties from artists and songwriters will be going to fake robot music. But I’m sure it’ll be higher if nothing is done about it. Already, a lot of music involves generative AI, and it’s a significant challenge.

One problem is: someone might say that only 2 percent of a song was written by generative AI, but then somebody who doesn’t want to pay them royalties would say: “Well, I think this was 100 percent written by generative AI, so prove to me that it was only 2 percent.” We are purists because we want to reduce the ambiguity for artists and songwriters and also reduce fraud for the music streaming platforms and the broadcasters that have to pay royalties.

Are there any good things that AI can bring to the music industry?
Of course, there’s a lot of good things that AI can do. But in terms of generative AI, I definitely think, unfortunately, it will only hurt the music industry because of the impact on royalty streams. I’m worried that the next generation of artists is not going to become artists, and that kids will grow up not having to be creative to entertain themselves, and they’ll feel like they created something when they just typed a prompt into a computer.

The reason why I’m concerned is because it’s eerily similar to when streaming became a thing and completely destroyed the monetization of the music industry. The response is very similar as people are saying: “This is going to destroy us.” And it just feels like we’ve seen this movie before.

There are certainly wonderful innovations, like editing tools, that can save hours and hours for producers. For example, GarageBand is an excellent tool, but it’s not generative AI. If you use it, you will still qualify for Humanable certification as long as you did everything yourself.

So there may be a role for AI in editing or in recommendation tools that are quite common, such as: “You like this piece of music. Try this one.” I enjoy that!

How important is IP protection for the music industry?
Without IP protection, there’s no music industry. And the cold, hard truth is that generative AI sound files (I refuse to call them “songs”) are flooding the streaming platforms. They’re everywhere. Thousands are uploaded every day and are eating up the royalty pool. Fake music is being created for commercials, movies, and TV. And there just won’t be a clear path for musicians and songwriters to pay their bills, and that’s challenging to do as a musician and a songwriter. Most professional songwriters at a publisher don’t get their first hit until they’ve been professionally writing songs for 10 years.

I think if generative AI is left unchallenged, we’re in existential-threat territory in the music industry because there’ll be no incentive to create original works.

What are the goals of Humanable and how does it aim to help artists?
At the core of the idea is that we try to preserve human creativity in music. Generative AI is obviously here and is disrupting the future for artists, and we want to provide the opportunity for songwriters and artists to certify that their music is free of generative AI. That’s not just to help them find fans, but so that publishers and labels, and hopefully streaming platforms, know that there’s no risk that their music is not 100 percent human made.

Humanable is about supply chain clarity more than anything else, to ensure that human artists should be receiving their full royalties. It’s a service for independent artists and it’s also for music publishers and labels.  It’s for everybody from the kid who just wrote his first song all the way up to big, successful music publishers and digital streaming platforms like Spotify.

At Humanable, we certify what I call the big three: the music is written by a human being; that any vocals are performed by humans; and the instrumentals are played by human beings and not generated by computer.

How does it work in practice?
As an independent artist, you must first become a member at humanable.com. That is very simple. We use Plaid Identity Verification to get to know you’re a human being, so we have that additional piece of clarity. For business-to-business, it’s a similar system, but it’s streamlined because we already know the people.

Once an artist or songwriter is a member, they can start certifying their music. Songwriters and artists declare under oath that their music is fully human and created without generative AI. Our system verifies that the member is a human. Then we issue a unique Humanable identifier and that’s really great for indie artists or songwriters hoping to land a publishing deal as it shows: you’re not taking a risk on me here. They all have a license to use the Humanable trademark, and if they want to put it on their record cover, they absolutely can.

The certification is usually instantaneous as long as there’s no problem with their verification and nothing comes up in the system. We also have an auditing system in place.

How many people have signed up so far?
I don’t know the exact number of members, but I know we’re well over 5 million songs at this time, probably closer to 6 million.

Where did the idea come from?
Humanable got started because I moved to Nashville and I “grassrooted” myself in the indie country world here and found that everyone was worried about the same thing. I had friends who had worked forever and had finally gotten that publishing deal, and they were really scared. Luckily, when I raised the problem statement to my dad, Paul McGrady, he wanted to fix it, too. And we realized that the solution was in certification marks and this was in our background. It’s about the confidence and the authenticity that comes with having a trademark that people recognize.

We got the idea in February 2024 during a business trip to Sedona, Arizona, which is a magical place. We decided we did not want to put this idea on hold but to grasp and develop it. We then invited my dad’s law partner, Jason Elster, to join the Founding team because of his background in commercial litigation. We were hiring software developers within a month.

Today we have two full-time staff, including me and our CEO, Tim Wipperman. My dad is now splitting his time between his law firm and his in-house role as General Counsel. We also have a bunch of very committed part-time contractors who are musicians, independent musicians, or songwriters, who help us out with things.

What are your plans for developing Humanable?
I have lots of hopes and dreams for Humanable. Our number one hope is that we’re able to convince streaming platforms that they don’t have to pay royalties to robots that can’t own copyrights. Then we would really love to work with them, to adopt a Humanable toggle in the streaming and other platforms so that passionate fans can filter in the certified human music and by default ignore the robot noise.

We’re already in talks with distributors for songs to go through a universal certification before they send them off to streaming platforms.

The response to Humanable has been really, really encouraging and we’ve had great support. Bart Herbison, the Executive Director of the Nashville Songwriters Association, has been our number one supporter.

Is there any potential in bringing copyright actions against some of these AI-created works?
I believe there already are. We’re not going to do that at Humanable on behalf of our members. We’re not an advocacy organization: the advocacy organizations have a place in the ecosystem, but that isn’t our role.

There are really cool things happening like the Elvis Act in Tennessee, which may now be the basis for new federal legislation. It protects famous people with really recognizable voices, but it may leave out the little guys that can’t afford litigation. At Humanable, we’re trying to prevent litigation that songwriters and artists can’t afford. The more people that are signed up, the more you’ll be able to get a kind of defense mechanism in place.

Are there any changes to the copyright protection regime that you would like to see?
Like I said, we’re not an advocacy organization. There are lots of other people out there fighting for the changes to copyright laws. At Humanable, we don’t pick sides; we just pick humans.

And our view is: we think trademarks solve the problem here. If we can get royalties flowing to the human artists and songwriters, as they should, the vast majority of generative AI song files should fall away as they are no longer profitable.

I don’t think we can put generative AI back in the barn, but we can show that human music is the pretty horse and AI is the ugly horse. My favorite way to talk about it to people who don’t know trademarks is: we’re like certified organic, but for music.

What do you have planned for your session at the INTA Annual Meeting?
We will have J. Scott Evans who will talk about the wonderful solutions that Adobe has in terms of licensing art for generative AI and paying the artists.

We also have a session musician flying in from Nashville named Carter Brallier, who is going to chat about the threats that he faces as someone who makes his money by playing bass in a recording studio, and how that is going to affect especially the indie artist community.

And then my dear friend, Kristina Murray, is going to open and close the panel with four original songs, so people will be entertained as well as informed!

What kind of music do you enjoy?
I enjoy lots of music. My favorite artist is Brandi Carlile. I’ve seen her more than 20 times, and I go to her music festival in Mexico every year.

I also really enjoy Kacey Musgrave’s music. I’m a huge fan of Kristina Murray’s music, so I’m looking forward to having her perform at our session at the INTA Annual Meeting. I have a very soft spot for a traditional country singer/songwriter.

I’m a hobbyist myself, though I try to go and hang out with the songwriters’ workshops whenever I can for a little tune-up. But mostly I’m cheering everybody on.

Learn more and register for the 2025 Annual Meeting.

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