Generative AI is the music industry’s biggest open question right now — and catalog owners are squarely in the crosshairs. Golnar Khosrowshahi, founder and CEO of Reservoir Media, addressed the risks and opportunities head-on in her appearance on Billboard’s On the Record. Here are five things every catalog owner should take away.
1. The threat to commodity music is already real
Not all music is equally exposed to AI disruption. Production music — the generic background tracks used in ads, podcasts, and corporate videos — is already being displaced by AI-generated alternatives. The same goes for wellness and ambient music. For catalog owners holding this type of library content, the cannibalization isn’t a future risk; it’s happening now. Khosrowshahi is direct about it: a whole class of commodity music has effectively been wiped out.
“There is a certain class of commodity music that will be — or has been — wiped out.”
2. But iconic, artist-driven catalogs are a different story
The catalogs most at risk from AI are the ones that could have been made by anyone. The ones least at risk are the ones that couldn’t. High-quality, artist-defined music — the kind tied to a specific creative voice, a cultural moment, or a legacy — is not something a generative model can replicate with authority. Khosrowshahi’s view is that Reservoir’s catalog, built around distinctive songwriters and artists, sits safely on the right side of that line. For catalog buyers, it reinforces the premium placed on music with genuine cultural identity.
“You need to invest and create a catalog of really, really high quality music — determined by the number of people and the frequency with which they’re listening.”
3. AI licensing income isn’t in anyone’s projections yet — and that’s a problem
Right now, most catalog owners — including Reservoir — are not projecting any revenue from AI platforms. There simply isn’t enough compelling data to model it yet. But that cuts both ways: they’re also not modeling meaningful cannibalization. The honest answer is that the industry is in a holding pattern, watching to see whether AI platforms will be forced to license the music they train on, and what that licensing structure will look like. The catalog owners who move early to establish licensing frameworks will have a significant advantage.
“We’re not projecting any licensing income as yet from those platforms — but we’re also not projecting cannibalization.”
4. Copyright protection is the only durable defense
Khosrowshahi frames the AI challenge the same way she frames every technological disruption: the delivery mechanism changes, but the underlying principle doesn’t. Whether it was ringtones, CDs, or streaming, the music business has always been about licensing IP and collecting revenue from that license. AI is no different — the priority is ensuring that generative models compensate the catalogs they are trained on. Catalog owners who treat AI as primarily a technology problem are missing the point; it’s fundamentally a copyright enforcement problem.
“We need to make sure that AI-generated music is compensating the IP on which it is trained. The precedent we set on IP licensing will determine how well or poorly we do in the future.”
5. AI could also be a powerful tool for catalog owners, not just a threat
Khosrowshahi offers a glimpse of AI’s upside through the lens of Reservoir’s experience clearing samples in the De La Soul catalog — an 18-month, Excel-spreadsheet-driven process of tracking down and licensing every uncleared sample before the music could go live on streaming platforms. Her instinct: that same exercise today, using AI tools, could take a fraction of the time. For catalog owners sitting on music with uncleared samples, messy rights chains, or decades of neglected administration, AI-assisted workflows could unlock significant value that has been sitting dormant.
“I wonder if 18 months would be one month — because we would be able to use AI tools to help us clear the samples.”
Based on Golnar Khosrowshahi’s appearance on On the Record, Billboard’s music industry podcast.