Country Duo Big & Rich Call for Ban on Monetizing AI-generated Music

NASHVILLE—One of country music’s most popular duos wants AI-generated music banned from monetization after the fast-growing technology disrupted the industry and oversaturated the listening landscape.

Big & Rich, known for hits like “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” and “Lost in This Moment,” released the timely song “Hello AI” on Aug. 28, saying the technology will never know “right from wrong” because it is a “mockingbird with a stolen song.”

The three-time Grammy-nominated team told The Epoch Times on Aug. 24 that they were inspired to write the track after seeing songwriters watch their intellectual property be plagiarized by AI to the point of “potential extinction” for the craft.

“I would like it to be deemed illegal to monetize AI-generated music,” John Rich said.

Rich warned that AI doesn’t leave a paper trail showing where it is ripping ideas from, causing artists to suffer in the end.

“Where do these AI programs get their information from to ‘create’ a new song?” Rich questioned.

“Where do they get it? Well, initially they get it from the human author and that human author’s work, and then beyond that, the AI-generated version of that song that they initially scraped becomes part of the catalogue that AI then goes in and scrapes again,” he continued.

“Meaning, it becomes a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox.”

Many musicians are using apps such as Suno, an AI music generator that costs $8 per month, to create full songs in seconds and distribute them on Apple and Spotify, competing with other artists who pay thousands of dollars to cut a track with humans.

The app even lets creators craft a song that sounds similar to a particular artist, export the file, and then pitch it to the artist with their voice.

Suno says users with a paid monthly subscription receive commercial use rights which “allow you to monetize the songs however you wish, without Suno claiming a stake in the earnings.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Suno to ask if the app was intended to make music for people to monetize but did not receive a comment by publishing time.

Rich doesn’t mind if musicians, who are up-and-coming, use it to create demos, but he does not support the moment that an AI-generated song pivots from being a tool to pitch new music into a profitable way to beef up someone’s pockets.

“My main concern is not somebody, you know, coming up, you know, trying to use my voice to pitch me,” Rich said. “The problem is: where is AI combing through to get the ideas [to] accomplish the prompt that you gave it?

“It only has one source, and its source is human authorship. So when does that human authorship get paid?”

Rich said nobody has pitched him a song that uses his voice, but Big Kenny did have that experience.

“Basically everything you can think of is happening,” Kenny said during an interview with The Epoch Times.

Kenny said technology can also make music videos with other artists in seconds.

“No one ever came to the writers, the artists, the singers, and said, ‘Hey, is it okay if we use all of everything that you’ve ever done to make it where other people can create in any form of your likeness that they want to?’” Kenny added.

Kenny added that songs are flooding into streaming websites on a daily basis.

“All of those songs are created off the backs of everything that every original creator did before them, and then they just keep getting diluted, diluted, diluted,” he said.

The performer warned that “trading artistic integrity for convenience is a dangerous descent.”

As of June 2026, Deezer, a music streaming platform, announced that AI-generated music has surpassed 50 percent of new music uploads for the first time, with 90,000 tracks being uploaded per day.

“Deezer has been at the frontline of fighting fraud and reducing payment dilution related to AI music for almost two years,” Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer, said in a statement on July 21.

“Now that half of all daily uploads are AI-generated tracks, we are taking additional steps to safeguard the rights of artists and songwriters, while maintaining focus on music that fans actually love.

An Amazon Music official told The Epoch Times that the platform has strong safeguards to combat misuse and makes ongoing efforts to protect the interests of artists and songwriters.

“Our robust systems prevent impersonation, deception, and spam, and have led to the removal of tens of millions of tracks from our service in the last year alone, including fraudulent AI-generated content,” the Amazon Music official said.

The Epoch Times contacted Spotify and Apple Music for the latest numbers on how many songs are uploaded to the platforms daily and if there is a way to track whether they were made by AI.

Streaming platform Tidal revealed in June 2026 that it would not pay royalties “to music we identify as wholly AI-generated.”

Performing rights organizations such as ASCAP and BMI have refused to register songs that are entirely AI compositions but will let people register partially AI-generated works.

Lawmakers in Washington have not made sweeping steps to ban AI-generated music from being monetized, but politicians in Tennessee approved a law that clarified artificial intelligence is not human and passed Tennessee’s ELVIS ACT (Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security Act), in July 2024.

The act makes it illegal to use someone’s voice, image or likeness in an AI replica without consent.

Australia banned wholly AI-generated music from the official charts after an AI-generated variation of Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” spent 16 weeks on the Australian Record Industry Association’s top 20 Australian singles chart this summer.

The association said it will still allow partially AI-assisted tracks.