Bands may soon need a certificate of humanity

An accreditation scheme under discussion within the recorded music industry would allow a release to carry a mark confirming that its composition, performance and vocals originated with human beings. The mark would be voluntary, verified by documentation, and — in the drafters' own description — the most straightforward part of an otherwise unresolved problem.

The difficulty begins immediately. Almost no commercial record has been made without software assistance since the early nineties. Pitch correction, quantisation, sample libraries and modelled amplifiers are all machine intervention, and none of them has ever troubled anybody's sense of authorship. The scheme would therefore need a threshold, and thresholds in art tend to be argued about at length and settled by whoever owns the catalogue.

The current draft reportedly works on origination rather than processing. A human would have to originate the melodic and lyrical material and perform the primary vocal; everything downstream could be processed freely. This produces the elegant and slightly troubling result that a record can be almost entirely machine-finished and still qualify, provided it started in a room with a person in it.

“We would not be certifying quality,” a spokesperson for the scheme would say. “We would be certifying provenance. A certified human record can still be dreadful. Several of the pilot submissions have demonstrated this conclusively and we thank the artists for their cooperation.”

The commercial motive is not sentimental. Streaming catalogues have absorbed an enormous volume of generated material, and the royalty pool is finite. A mark that lets listeners filter is also a mark that lets a distributor argue for different placement, different payout treatment and, eventually, a different tier of the same subscription.

Musicians would split along predictable lines. Established acts with documentation, session logs and studio bookings would find certification trivial. A producer working alone on a laptop with no paperwork would find it expensive and faintly insulting, which is roughly what happened the last three times the industry introduced a standard to protect artists.

Nothing has launched. But listeners are already asking the question in comment sections, platforms are already adding disclosure labels, and the market is already discovering that made by humans is the rarest thing it can currently put on a sticker.