Arooj Aftab says musicians must be paid when AI is trained on their songs

Grammy-winning Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab says musicians are owed compensation when their recordings are used to train artificial intelligence models, in two Instagram Stories she posted on Tuesday, Dawn Images reported on Wednesday 21 October. Both stories reshared posts from the United Musicians and Allied Workers, a music-industry union.

What she said

Aftab's argument, as Dawn Images summarised it, has four parts:

• AI music is built from human-made music, so the artists whose work it learns from are affected.
• Using a track to train an AI model is a use of that work, and musicians should be paid for it now, not only once new rules arrive.
• Musicians should also get royalties when their work is used to make derivative tracks.
• AI-generated music should be labelled at every stage so listeners know what they are hearing, and streaming platforms should pay human artists directly rather than share that money with AI music makers.

The wider fight over AI music

Aftab is joining a long line of musicians. In 2024 more than 13,000 artists, including ABBA's Bjorn Ulvaeus and Radiohead's Thom Yorke, signed a statement against unlicensed use of human music to train AI, and in February 2025 more than 1,000 musicians, Kate Bush among them, released a silent album in protest at UK plans to allow AI training on copyrighted work, Dawn Images noted.

Streaming services have started to respond. Spotify has added "Verified for Spotify" labels for human creators and "AI Persona" badges for AI music, and says it has removed more than 50 million spam and "slop" tracks from its recommendations and verified more than 300,000 human creators.

What it means for Pakistani musicians

For artists in Pakistan the question Aftab raises is the same: whether anyone pays when their songs feed a model. Musicians who earn from streaming and live work abroad can check what they owe on foreign income with our freelancer tax calculator, and convert dollar or pound payouts on our currency converter.