AI & Music
AI Transparency in Music Licensing
By the Starchild Music team · September 23, 2026 · 5 min read
The short answer
Starchild labels every song as human-written, hybrid, or AI, with the maker's own plain-language disclosure on hybrid and AI songs. Labels never change your license rights — they change what you know. Uploads are never used to train models.
AI is now part of how records get made — including here: Starchild's adaptive productions are rendered by our pipeline, and personalization can shape a song around a buyer's voice. The line we hold isn't "no AI." It's "no surprises." Anyone licensing a song deserves to know exactly what they're licensing.
The three labels
Every song on Starchild carries one of three authorship classes. Human-written: composition and vocal are human work (AI may appear only downstream, in production tooling). Hybrid: a declared mix — typically human lyric and vocal over AI-assisted instrumental work. AI: substantially AI-generated, labeled as such. Hybrid and AI songs additionally display the maker's own disclosure — a plain-language note on the song page describing what was human and what wasn't.
The label doesn't change your rights: AI-class songs license exactly like everything else, with the same tiers and certificates. It changes what you know — which is the point.
Two commitments behind the labels
First, classification is honest by construction: a fully AI-generated song can't be dressed as "hybrid" because a human typed the prompt — authorship class reflects who wrote the song, not who supervised it. Second, the pipeline is one-directional: songs and voices uploaded to Starchild are never used to train models. Your demo teaches nothing; your voice stays yours.
What to ask, wherever you license
The industry's labeling norms are still forming, and 2026's flood of AI catalogs makes the question urgent anywhere you shop: Who wrote this? Is the vocal human? Is the provenance disclosed in writing? Will my license paperwork reflect it? On Starchild those answers are on the song page before you pay — we think that should be table stakes everywhere.