ONCE + AI Music. Why It's Good For Us.

Here's the long version...

The Uncomfortable Truth

We've spent decades in the music industry. We've watched formats come and go, watched revenue models collapse and rebuild, watched artists get squeezed by every new platform that promised to "democratize" music.

AI music generation is the latest one (and to be honest, it makes us uncomfortable too).

But here's what we know after all those years: discomfort doesn't stop anything.

The tools exist. They're getting better fast. The latest models from Google, Suno, and more are capable of producing radio-quality, three-minute songs for pennies. The APIs are public. No waitlist. Free open-source models are catching up. Anyone with a phone and an idea can make a distributable song right now.

34% of music uploaded to Deezer daily is already AI-generated. That was six months ago. The number is higher now.

This is not a future problem. It's a today problem.

The question isn't whether AI music ends up on Spotify and Apple Music. It already does. The question is whether the musicians whose art trained these models see a single dollar from it.

Right now, the answer is no.

What We Built

ONCE Music Generation (OMG) lets anyone generate a song inside ONCE, preview it, and distribute it to Spotify, Apple Music, and 25+ other stores without leaving the platform.

Here's the pricing model we settled on, and it's deliberately simple:

• AI release: $2 flat. Whether you generated the track inside OMG, uploaded it from Suno, uploaded it from Udio, or pulled it out of any other AI tool. Same price. No favorites.
• Human-recorded release: $1.
• That extra dollar on AI releases - every single one - goes into the Artist Compensation Fund.

The key bit: the AI surplus doesn't go to us. It goes into a dedicated Artist Compensation Fund.

That's the entire play. Let people create. Charge a flat $1 premium on every AI release regardless of where it came from. Route the surplus back to the artists whose work made these models possible.

We considered charging more for OMG than for Suno uploads. We rejected that. The ethical case for the surcharge doesn't care which AI tool produced the song; it's the same models trained on the same artists' work. Same surcharge for all of it.

Why a Distributor Must Do This

If ONCE doesn't do this, someone else will. And they won't care.

Right now, anyone can generate a song on Suno, download it, and upload it to DistroKid or TuneCore with zero disclosure. No money goes back to artists. No tracking. No transparency. No one even knows it happened until the song pops up on their playlist two weeks later.

We're the first distribution platform to natively generate AI music and prioritize distribution to official stores.

• Suno and Udio generate music but can't get it on Spotify.
• DistroKid and TuneCore distribute music but don't generate it (and don't properly track AI provenance, at all).

We do both, under one roof, with a complete chain of custody from the moment someone types a prompt to the moment the track goes live on streaming platforms.

Why We're the Only Ones Trying

ONCE was built by musicians. Reid Shippen has Grammys on the shelf. We've been writing music and shipping records for decades. This isn't a tech company cosplaying as a music company. We have skin in the game.

When Reid says artists react poorly to AI-generated music, he's reporting from the trenches. When we say the money should flow back to songwriters, that's a conviction forged by decades of watching the industry promise one thing and deliver another.

We already have the infrastructure:

• AI detection on every upload through our Vobile partnership, flagging AI content whether it was generated through OMG or uploaded from somewhere else.
• Automatic AI disclosure metadata delivered to every DSP.
• A complete audit trail for every generation.
• Rate limiting.
• Restricted playback for AI content.

No one else has built this stack. No one else is even trying.

We're the first distributor honest enough to build a responsible path for AI-generated music.

The Math

We believe in transparency. Here's exactly where the money goes.

Almost half of what you pay goes directly to artists. Not to us. To musicians.

Is that a lot compared to Suno's ~2 cents per track? Yes. That's the point.

The premium is the feature. It signals that you're serious about distributing AI music professionally and ethically. It deters people from flooding platforms with low-effort content. And it funds the people whose creativity made all of this possible in the first place.

The ONCE Artist Compensation Fund

For the canonical public page on fund mechanics, pricing split, and FAQ, see Artist Compensation Fund (ACF).

We want to be honest about what we can and can't do today.

We cannot attribute individual artists right now. The current state of AI training data is, as Reid puts it, "a big ass soup of stuff that's untrackable." We're not going to make promises we can't keep.

Here's what we can do:

A Message to Suno and ElevenLabs

Every track that comes through ONCE gets scanned. We know, with high accuracy, which songs were generated by which platforms. We know when a track was made with Suno. We know when it was made with ElevenLabs. We know when it was made with Lyria. Our detection and provenance infrastructure is live and functional, analyzing every single file that comes through our pipes.

When we publish our Artist Compensation Fund transparency reports (and we will, quarterly, starting this year) those reports will show exactly how much money ONCE has routed back to artists from AI-generated music distribution. Broken down by generation source.

Those reports will also make something very clear: which platforms are participating in artist compensation and which ones aren't.

Right now, Suno charges less than two cents per track and sends zero dollars back to the artists whose music trained their models. Other platforms like ElevenLabs and Udio have built incredible voice and audio technology on the backs of human creators with no compensation framework in sight.

We're not here to shame anyone. We're here to build the infrastructure that makes compensation possible, and to show the industry what responsible AI music distribution looks like.

We have the methodology. We have the tracking. We have the fund. We have the reporting.

The door is open. Our API and MCP can spin up fully-featured music distribution for partners in less than a week. We would welcome Suno, ElevenLabs, Udio, and any other generation platform to work with us and use ONCE's distribution infrastructure, so that when their tools are used to create music that ends up on Spotify and Apple Music, the artists who made those tools possible actually get paid.

Until they do, our reports will speak for themselves.

What Comes Next

We're not saying it's ideal (and it's certainly uncomfortable), but one way to fix it is through the flooding of the market with extreme homogeneity; then the truly creative, the innovative, the new, the fresh, the bright lights, along with the work that gives purpose and causes the best kind of sleepless nights, will be clear as the rising sun.

We've held that belief for a while now. OMG is how we act on it.

Within the next year or two, we believe most DSPs will require mandatory AI disclosure as a condition of distribution. When that happens, ONCE is already there. We don't have to scramble to comply. We become the obvious choice for anyone who needs a distribution path that passes the new requirements.

We're building toward a world where AI-generated music distribution is transparent, auditable, and funds the artists whose work made the models possible. That's the mission. That's what OMG is for.

Try OMG at once.app →