Music and AI Trends for 2026: Insights from Tuned Global
As 2026 approaches, the music industry faces significant technological and commercial change. Con Raso (pictured), Managing Director of music streaming technology solution provider Tuned Global, shared his perspective on seven key trends that will define the industry over the next 12 months and more.
Fraud and AI: A Billion-Dollar Problem
Streaming fraud represents one of the industry’s most pressing challenges. It is “industrialised” now and no longer just bedroom hackers. There are networks exploiting loopholes in ways that mirror organised cybercrime.
“Experts in music fraud estimate streaming fraud at over a billion dollars a year, with 80% of that fraud being executed by sophisticated actors,” Raso explains.
“The goal of fraudsters is to get artificially generated or fraudulent tracks, sometimes made using unlicensed content, played repeatedly, often by hijacking a user’s account. The royalties from those plays flow into the general pool and are then paid out to the perpetrators through rights ownership, just like legitimate artists. That’s primarily how it’s monetised.”
In a pro‑rata model, every fraudulent stream takes money away from real artists. It’s not extra money, it’s just unfairly dividing the same pie.”
While AI is also creating issues through its generative capabilities, it is also part of a solution.
“AI in general is creating other challenges especially when it comes to impersonating artists’ voices, videos, imagery and likenesses,” Raso says. “Even though several companies claim to have detection tools, they’re still in their nascent forms, and so we’d expect a lot of emerging technologies to assist with this situation.
“That said, AI also gives us the ability to analyse deep behavioural patterns. Sophisticated fraud isn’t easy to catch manually but with AI, it becomes possible.”
AI Will Replace Developers as Primary API Users
Raso expects that as AI agents grow in sophistication, a lot of music infrastructure will shift to serve AI systems directly as it will be AI doing the interfacing.
“We’re seeing that in the future, it will more likely be AIs that are querying our systems than developers directly. That’s called MCP (Model Context Protocol), which is the technology that allows AI systems like OpenAI to use our APIs as though it was just an extension of itself,” he says.
“Developers could go to something like OpenAI and say, ‘Here’s what I’m building, I’m using Tuned Global, here are some credentials’, and it would actually just use our infrastructure to actually build out a full end solution for them. It won’t remove the developer but it will remove the plumbing.”
The addressable market for music technology continues to expand.
AI, Gaming and Real-Time Music Adaptation
Looking to gaming, Raso believes games will move beyond sync licensing to dynamic, gameplay-responsive soundtracks.
“That could be as simple as an AI bot looking at the people that are in the gameplay and adapting the music style and the music itself to actually align with the gameplay itself,” he says.
“That’s much more instant and transient than being programmed at the time the game is created. Those opportunities exist because technology is allowing us to actually do these things in real time at the moment, whereas 12 months ago, it wasn’t possible.”
