Did Your Distributor Just Licence Your Music for AI Training? We Read the Contracts

Since February a music lawyer's video has been circulating with a blunt claim: distributors are getting artists to opt in to AI training in a misleading way, and LANDR in particular. It has 16,600 plays, 984 likes and 96 comments, and a follow-up from the same account predicts the labels will come for consent through distributors specifically. Nobody in either comment section had opened a contract. So we did, reading what four music distributor AI training clauses actually say on 10 September 2026, quoting them rather than summarising them.

The takeaways are not what the video suggests. The distributor it names is the only one of the four that asks permission first and pays for the answer. The genuinely sweeping AI licence in this group belongs to a company nobody is warning anyone about, and it took effect two days before this article.

The claim, and why it is worth testing

The video is not unreasonable. Distribution contracts are long, they are updated without ceremony, and the update notice is an email most people archive. A clause that appears in version 14 of a document you agreed to at version 9 is, functionally, a clause you never read.

It is also the one story in this niche that runs the other way. Almost everything written about AI and distribution asks whether a distributor will accept AI-generated music — our own DistroKid AI music policy and TuneCore AI music policy pages are both that question. This asks what rights the distributor takes in whatever you hand over. Here the artist is not the one deploying AI. The artist is the training data.

What made it worth checking rather than repeating is that the secondary coverage disagrees with itself. One widely-cited roundup reports that DistroKid grants itself broad AI training rights. Another reports the opposite for the same company in the same year. At least one of those is wrong, and a reader has no way to tell which without the source document. That is a bad situation for a decision that is irreversible the moment you upload.

What we read, and what we could not

We opened each company's public terms, searched for artificial intelligence, machine learning, model training and data mining, and read the general licence grant in full whether or not those terms appeared. Where a clause exists we quote it.

CD Baby is an honest blank. Every published path to its terms returned 403 or 404 on the day we checked, so we make no claim about its contract in either direction. Our CD Baby AI music policy page covers its position on distributing AI-generated music, which is a different question from what its contract licenses.

UnitedMasters: the clause that took effect on 8 September 2026

This is the finding. UnitedMasters' terms carry a section headed "AI and Machine Learning Use of User Content" that opens: "Effective [September 8, 2026], the following applies to User Content and Masters you upload to the platform on or after that date."

The square brackets are in the live contract. A bracketed date is drafting scaffolding that normally gets replaced before signature, and it is still sitting in the document readers are agreeing to.

The clause then defines four AI Uses.

Read (iii) again. It is not only that the company may train on your masters. It may hand them to other companies to train on, and under (iv) may commercialise what those models produce. The underlying licence is described elsewhere in the same document as royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and sublicensable.

There is a real carve-out. AI uses expressly exclude any output that replicates or is substantially derived from the voice, name or likeness of a specific identifiable individual, and any digital replica as defined under applicable law, each requiring separate prior written consent. So the clause covers the recording, not a synthetic version of the person who made it.

Two limits cut in the artist's favour. It binds only content uploaded on or after 8 September 2026, so a back catalogue delivered before that date is outside it. And you may opt out at any time. We come back to what the opt-out does and does not achieve below.

LANDR: the distributor everyone was warned about is the one that pays

LANDR's Fair Trade AI is the programme the viral claim points at, and it is the clearest opt-in arrangement of the four. Its own page states you must opt in to participate and can opt out at any time.

The economics are published, which by itself distinguishes it. Participating artists receive 25 percent of net licensing revenue, split pro rata — LANDR's example is that a track in a licence of 10,000 tracks earns one ten-thousandth of that 25 percent, net of direct charges, paid monthly. A separate advance offered $5 per eligible track, recoupable, conditional on staying opted in until it recouped or 24 months passed. Eligibility requires holding 100 percent of both recording and publishing rights, which quietly excludes anyone with a co-writer who has not signed off.

More to the point for the original claim: LANDR's general terms of service grant no AI training rights outside that programme. The relevant general provision is that it may analyse user data to test functionality and to assess and improve its services, which is ordinary service-improvement language rather than a model-training grant.

There is an asymmetry worth naming. LANDR forbids its own users from training models on LANDR samples — "use any Sample for the purpose of training machine learning models, or for any form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) development". The company is stricter about its catalogue being trained on than its default terms are about yours. That is a fair thing to be annoyed about. It is not the thing the video said.

DistroKid and TuneCore: no AI clause is not the same as no

Neither contract mentions AI. That is the reassuring half. The other half is what the general grants say.

DistroKid's licence covers submitted content "for any purpose on or in connection with the Services". TuneCore's §6.2 grants a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence, sublicensable, to "use, reproduce, digitize, encode, store, transmit, distribute, modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, communicate to the public and otherwise exploit" submitted content.

The two rows that matter are the last two, and the honest reading is that these contracts are silent rather than protective. "Prepare derivative works" and "for any purpose" are broad enough that a company minded to argue the point would start there. A company that intended AI training and wanted it beyond argument would do what UnitedMasters did and write it down.

So the practical answer for DistroKid and TuneCore as of 10 September 2026 is: no AI training clause exists, no permission has been given, and no promise has been made either. Anyone telling you those contracts already license AI training is reading something that is not in the document.

Opt-in, opt-out, and the thing neither one undoes

Consent defaults are where the money and the ethics both sit.

Now the part both models share. An opt-out is forward-looking. The UnitedMasters terms say that following your opt-out the company will exclude your masters from future AI use. There is no undertaking to remove your work's influence from a model already trained, because that is not a routine operation and no contract here offers it.

That makes the upload the irreversible act and the opt-out a much weaker instrument than it sounds. If you care about this, the moment to act is before delivery, not after a policy email. It is also why the 8 September boundary matters more than it first appears: material delivered before that date sits outside the clause permanently, and material delivered after it is inside from the second it lands.

Five phrases to search for in your own contract

This is generalisable. Open your distributor's terms and search for five strings.

Two habits make this worth repeating rather than doing once. Note the date you read it — both contracts with AI language here changed in the last six months, and the UnitedMasters section is nine days old at the time of writing. And read the general grant even when the AI search returns nothing, because that grant is what a company would have to rely on if it ever wanted to argue the point.

If you want the wider commercial picture around these agreements, our music distribution services comparison covers what each one costs and takes, and free music distribution covers the tiers where the terms tend to be broadest.

What this changes if you release AI-generated music

If your tracks come out of Suno or Udio, you now have two separate contract questions rather than one. Whether the distributor will accept an AI-generated release is the familiar one. Whether its terms license your delivered masters for someone else's model training is the new one, and it is answered in a different section of a different document.

Neither has anything to do with the third gate, which is automated. Distributor screening systems read the audio, not the paperwork. Tracks do get flagged and rejected by those systems, and no clause in any of these contracts changes what a spectral analysis sees — that is what Undetectr addresses, and it is a genuinely unrelated problem from the one this article is about. Our AI music copyright page covers the ownership question that sits underneath both.

It is worth being clear-eyed about the wider situation, because contract terms are not most people's actual bottleneck. The recurring complaint in the AI-music communities is not that distribution is impossible; it is that nobody listens once a release is live. Distribution is largely solved and discovery is not.

That is the honest case for not routing everything through platforms whose terms you do not control. Paid sync placement — getting a track into a show, a game or an ad — is the part of this market where the money is discussed in concrete numbers, and it does not depend on algorithmic reach at all; played.fm runs that pitch route alongside a direct storefront where you keep 100 percent and own the customer relationship. Our sync licensing guide covers how that side of the business works regardless of which platform you use.

The wider point is smaller than the video that prompted it, and more useful. One distributor now takes AI training rights by default. One asks and pays. Two are silent. The difference between those positions is about 400 words of contract text, and it is on the public internet in every case. Read it before you upload, note the date, and check it again in six months.