The Music Industry in the Age of AI: On the Paradox of Abundance

How Are Music Platforms Embracing Change in the Era of AI Creation?

As AI-powered creation rapidly transforms the music production and distribution landscape, this session explores what role music platforms should play in moving beyond simple streaming and distribution to build an ecosystem where creators and technology can coexist. It examines the need for platforms to undergo structural transformation in response to the proliferation of AI-generated music, while highlighting new roles for platforms in fostering mutually beneficial coexistence between technological innovation and the creator ecosystem. The session will also introduce the vision, key features, current operations, and achievements of Tencent Music’s AI platform ‘Venus’, presenting new possibilities for the music distribution market through its one-stop technology infrastructure.

The session will explore, through practical use cases, how Venus integrates AI-powered music production and publishing across the entire process, from creation and release to marketing. It will also discuss how creativity and copyright protection can coexist in the AI era through transparent data tracking and rights-holder-centered settlement processes. Finally, it will present directions for the future music ecosystem, focusing on securing diversity within the creative ecosystem and expanding the reach of music content through technological innovation, as well as establishing rights-protection infrastructure and legitimate licensing models that enable technology and rights protection to coexist.

A New Standard for AI-Generated Music Detection and Rights Protection

Tony Li is Co-Founder of ACRCloud, a global audio recognition technology company serving the music and media industries. His work focuses on audio fingerprinting, music recognition, content identification, and music data technologies.

ACRCloud was founded in 2015. ACRCloud works closely with music streaming platforms, phone makers, car makers, CMO, music distributors, rights holders, broadcasters, UGC platforms, AI music-gen platforms and technology partners worldwide, helping them apply recognition technologies to music discovery, content monitoring, copyright management, and emerging AI-generated music use cases.

Tony is particularly interested in how AI and data technologies are reshaping music creation, distribution, and rights management.

How AI Is Rewriting the K-pop Formula

Changes in the K-pop industry in the age of AI extend beyond the realm of creation, affecting the broader industrial structure in which data, platforms, and fandom intersect. This presentation examines how generative AI is being integrated across the music industry value chain—from creation and planning to distribution and fan experience—and explores how the growing influence of platforms and recommendation algorithms is changing the ways music is discovered and consumed, as well as how hits are made.

It also examines how AI-assisted creation and the expansion of virtual artists and digital twins are reshaping the roles of creators, notions of authorship, and the relationship between humans and technology. Finally, the presentation addresses the need for transparency and labeling in the use of AI and proposes trust as a core value for the sustainable development of the music industry in the age of AI.

VR Concerts: The Medium Music and Artists Deserve

As AI and digital content multiply, the music industry is rediscovering the worth of what only an artist and an audience can create together. AMAZE sees VR as the closest a camera has yet come to putting an audience in the room with an artist.

This session goes inside how a VR concert is made. Freed from where a camera can physically stand, a VR shoot can hold an artist an arm's length away and keep them there for an entire song. AMAZE will show how its AI and Unreal Engine pipeline makes that repeatable, and how a system that turns an ordinary cinema into a VR venue carried the result to audiences worldwide.

AMAZE staged the world's first commercial VR concert theatrical tour in 2022. It has gone on to sell more than a million tickets in over 70 cities across 18 countries, with a new title released every two months since June 2025. A VR concert plays in cities a live tour will never reach, and for far less. That is where it finds its audience. Using its own sales data, the talk traces how a casual listener who sees an artist up close turns into a core fan who buys tour tickets and albums.

Drawing on collaborations with artists around the world and on the production work itself, the session asks where VR concerts belong in the music industry's value chain — as a distribution channel and as a business model — and what happens to the bond between an artist and an audience when the technology finally gets out of the way.