Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam formed in Seattle in 1990 around vocalist Eddie Vedder and became grunge’s most enduring institution: the 1991 debut Ten sold over 13 million copies in the US, and three decades of relentless touring carried the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. They released their twelfth album, Dark Matter, in April 2024 — the same month they took a public stand on AI.

Signing the ARA letter

In April 2024, Pearl Jam signed the Artist Rights Alliance open letter as a band, joining more than 200 artists — Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Jon Bon Jovi, R.E.M. — in 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.” The letter charged that companies were training models on artists’ work without permission and warned that AI-generated sound threatens to dilute the royalty pools working musicians are paid from.

The stand fits a long institutional pattern. Pearl Jam is the band that took Ticketmaster to the Justice Department in 1994 over monopoly service fees, boycotted the giant for years at real cost to its own touring, and fought bootleggers by releasing its own official live recordings. Confronting technology platforms over how musicians get paid is, for this band, a thirty-year-old habit.

Like every ARA signatory, the band endorsed a letter that explicitly allows for the technology’s upside: “when used responsibly, AI has enormous potential to advance human creativity.” The target is unlicensed exploitation, not innovation.