Artist Rights Alliance
Musicians’ Advocacy Organization
Artist-led advocacy nonprofit that organized the April 2024 “Stop Devaluing Music” open letter — signed by more than 200 acts from Billie Eilish to Stevie Wonder — demanding AI developers stop using artists’ work without permission.
In their words
This assault on human creativity must be stopped. We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.
Unchecked, AI will set in motion a race to the bottom that will degrade the value of our work and prevent us from being fairly compensated for it.
Biography
The Artist Rights Alliance (ARA) is a nonprofit, artist-led education and advocacy organization — the successor to the Content Creators Coalition — run by and for working musicians on issues from streaming royalties to copyright. Its board has included working songwriters and performers rather than label executives, which gives its campaigns unusual credibility inside the industry.
Stop Devaluing Music
On April 2, 2024, the ARA published an open letter calling on AI developers, technology companies, platforms, and digital music services to “cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.” More than 200 artists signed, including Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder, Katy Perry, Pearl Jam, Robert Smith, Elvis Costello, Smokey Robinson, Jon Bon Jovi, and the estates of Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley — one of the broadest artist coalitions ever assembled on a single issue.
The letter is more precise than its headlines suggested: it concedes that “when used responsibly, AI has enormous potential to advance human creativity,” and targets two specific practices — training AI “copycats” on artists’ work without permission, and flooding platforms with AI-generated sounds that dilute the royalty pools paid to human musicians. The ARA has since pressed the same case in Washington, backing legislation like the NO FAKES Act to protect artists’ voices and likenesses from unauthorized cloning.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
- Artist Rights Alliance (Medium): 200+ artists call on AI developers, tech platforms not to devalue music (2024)
- Variety: Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder call on AI developers to respect artists’ rights (2024)
- NME: Billie Eilish, Robert Smith and more sign open letter against “predatory” AI (2024)
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/artist-rights-alliance