27.11.2025: UK Music’s This Is Music economic report has revealed that 66% of creators believe that AI poses a threat to their career.

As part of UK Music’s landmark report into the financial health of the sector, we conducted a survey for creators designed to gauge their views on AI, from how it is impacting their careers to the ways in which it can be used as part of their creative process. Our findings show that 66% of respondents, comprised of artists, performers, writers and producers, agreed with the statement ‘AI poses a threat to my career as a creator’. Only 13% disagreed with the statement, while 21% neither agreed nor disagreed.

Earlier this year, musicians, creative industry leaders and politicians joined forces at Westminster (pictured above) to call on the Government to ditch plans to allow AI tech firms to steal their work without payment or permission. You can read more about the demonstration here.

The headline figures from This Is Music revealed that the UK music industry contributed a record £8 billion to the economy in 2024, with exports revenue hitting a new high of £4.8 billion. You can read more about the report here.

However, while the £8 billion contribution made last year marked a record high, the rate of growth was down by more than half on 2023, meaning urgent action needs to be taken to address this significant drop.

One of the key areas of concern in this regard is AI.

Artificial Intelligence is a major issue for the music industry, particularly where rights are being infringed by AI companies undertaking unlicensed learning. This was heightened late in 2024 following the government proposing changes to copyright that make it harder for creators and businesses within the music industry to enforce their rights.

We asked respondents to our 2025 music creators’ survey questions about Artificial Intelligence (AI). This revealed that some music creators, especially record producers and engineers, already use AI for tasks such as audio restoration, creating demos, and mastering.

However, AI can be used to generate music based on what the model was trained on, with little to no human input, which raises concerns that AI generated music is a threat to human creation and artist development. For example, AI-generated music populates streaming playlists, misleads consumers, and reduces the share of royalties available for human creators. AI has attracted significant media coverage, but knowledge and understanding of what constitutes AI and how it will be applied in practice are still evolving and will continue to do so for some time.

Record producers have more experience with using AI in assistive tasks than other creator roles and have a more positive view of AI used as part of the creative process, where the human creator remains in control. When it comes to matters such as consent, payment, labelling AI content, and ensuring a creator’s voice and image are protected, music creators are overwhelmingly united in agreeing that such protections should be in place, with over 90% of respondents indicating their support. This sends a clear message to the technology sector and government about what is required. There is a high level of concern across the music creator community as a whole, but songwriters and composers have a heightened level of concern across all the questions raised, and with good reason.

Many UK-based songwriters and composers work in media and production music, which can be a career in itself or part of a portfolio career. AI poses a particular threat to this area of work, which is likely to devastate the careers of those most affected and have a broader destabailising impact on music creators as a whole.

Copyright protections are fundamental to economics of the music industry and ability for creators and rights holders to authorise use and participate in value creation. Introducing a copyright exception would undermine any licensing process.

See what respondents to our survey had to say below.