The Sonic Intelligence Academy (SIQA) published its Mid-Year AI Music Intelligence Report this month, covering 1,743 verified submissions from 886 artists across 54 countries and twenty complete chart cycles between April 1 and Aug. 20.
Its headline conclusion is that the “industry era” of AI music has begun. Warner Music artist The Second Voice debuted at No. 1 on the SIQA Top 100 — the first major-label AI act to top the chart. Big name Tyga charted. Fenix Flexin did, too. In SIQA’s framing, this is the period AI music stopped being a category the industry was watching and became one it was actively participating in.
The rest of the findings support a story of a maturing ecosystem. Gospel nearly doubled its submission share and took a quarter of the Top 10 in the back half of the period. Fully machine-generated tracks fell to 13.9%, meaning 86.1% of submissions now involve meaningful human creative contribution. Suno powers 92.8% of submitted tracks. The UK climbed to second place internationally, Nigeria doubled its share, and Australia entered the top five.
SIQA launched its Verified Registry and iOS app alongside the report — the first public infrastructure built to verify AI music at the source rather than flag it after the fact. The closing line is that the dataset is not getting smaller.
All of that is accurate as reported. But with two reporting periods now available, another story emerges — one that neither report could fully show on its own. Set the mid-year report beside the inaugural Q1 edition and compare the two datasets directly, and the picture shifts.
The category is expanding into its second reporting period, but it’s also consolidating. Here’s what becomes visible when the two SIQA reports are read together.
Disclosure: Editor Marcus Lawrence serves on SIQA’s Creative Advisory Council.
The submission rate roughly halved.
A SIQA submission is an artist voluntarily filing a track for chart consideration. They enter it through SIQA’s form, declare how AI was used under SIQA’s classification framework, confirm the track is distributed on at least one major DSP, and agree to the anti-fraud policy. SIQA’s team then verifies it.
Q1 logged 1,551 submissions from 828 artists across Jan. 30 to March 31 — about nine weeks. The mid-year report logged 1,743 from 886 artists across April 1 to Aug. 20 — 20 weeks.
The dataset grew, obviously. But the pace changed.
Q1 averaged about 175 submissions per week. Across the longer mid-year window, that fell to about 87. Normalize the artist totals across the same periods and the pattern is similar: 92 artists per week of reporting time in Q1 versus 44 in mid-year.
That doesn’t mean half as many artists are making AI music. These are unique artists counted across each full reporting window, not weekly active users, and SIQA participation is voluntary. The chart also doesn’t depend entirely on submissions — SIQA’s team discovers and verifies tracks directly.
What it does show is that the first two reporting periods captured different participation rhythms.
Q1 was SIQA’s launch period, when the chart, classification system and submission process were all new. Mid-year covers more than twice as much time, after that initial burst of attention had settled into an ongoing reporting system.
There’s another possibility worth considering, too: self-identifying as an AI creator may carry more baggage now than it did in January.
Between increased industry scrutiny, AI labeling policy rollouts, increased social backlash and platform policies that can affect monetization or recommendation, creators have more reason to think twice about what attaching an AI classification to their work could mean.
But there’s no causation in SIQA’s published data for the slowdown (or indication it exists).
We also don’t know how much overlap exists between the two artist populations. Existing creators may be submitting less often, fewer new creators may be entering, attitudes toward disclosure may be changing — or all three could be happening at once.
That makes the next reporting period especially interesting. The mid-year window closed Aug. 20, before SIQA launched its Verified Registry and app in September. The Registry gives creators something beyond chart consideration: a provenance record, verification and a persistent record of how AI was used.
So these first two reports now provide a baseline.
Q1 captured the launch. Mid-year captured what happened after the initial rush. The next report can begin to show what happens when both the incentives to disclose and the consequences of disclosure are changing.
The genre center of gravity is shifting faster than it looks.
SIQA analyzed the 20-week mid-year reporting period in two 10-week halves, which makes one shift especially easy to see.
Across the first 10 chart cycles, R&B/Soul dominated the Top 10, accounting for 63% of placements, compared with Gospel at 13%. Across the final 10 cycles, that gap disappeared: both genres accounted for 25%.
So the movement is clear. R&B/Soul lost considerable ground over the period while Gospel gained it. SIQA describes Gospel as “overtaking” R&B/Soul; technically, the two end the period level at 25%, though Gospel clearly has the momentum.
This shift looks even larger when we zoom out and compare the mid-year period with Q1.
Across all 20 mid-year cycles, R&B/Soul accounted for 44% of Top 10 placements and Gospel 19%. The report compares those figures with Q1 numbers of 40% and 20%, respectively, which would suggest very little changed.
But those aren’t equivalent measurements. The cited Q1 figures — 40% R&B/Soul and 20% Gospel — refer to genre representation across the entire Top 100, not the Top 10.
Q1’s actual Top 10 figures were 57.1% R&B/Soul and 14.3% Gospel. Compare Top 10 to Top 10, and the movement becomes much clearer: R&B/Soul fell about 13 percentage points between reporting periods, while Gospel gained nearly five.
There’s a smaller wrinkle in the submission data, too. The two reports give slightly different figures for Q1. The original Q1 report put Gospel at 8.7% of submissions and Hip-Hop at 10.9%. The mid-year report, looking back at that same quarter, cites 8.1% and 11.8%, respectively, without explaining the revision.
Those differences are small, however, and they don’t change the underlying story. Across both the submission data and the chart itself, Gospel is gaining ground, while Hip-Hop and R&B/Soul are giving some of theirs up.
DistroKid dominates — but the denominator matters.
SIQA’s distribution finding is one of the report’s most striking: DistroKid carries 77.6% of mid-year submissions with distributor data, up from 75.8% in Q1.
Q1 told you exactly what that figure was built on. Its methodology page listed 413 submissions with distributor data out of 1,551 total — about 27% of the dataset.
The mid-year report says its 77.6% figure covers submissions with distributor data, but it doesn’t specify how many submissions that represents. The sample-size box lists total submissions, artists, countries, chart cycles and chart slots, but not distributor coverage.
That matters more now than it did in April.
On Sept. 15, Universal Music Group, Capitol Records and Capitol CMG sued DistroKid in federal court in Delaware, alleging the platform has become a pipeline for mass-generated AI uploads. The complaint says DistroKid now delivers more than half of all new tracks released weekly on one major streaming service.
SIQA’s data predates that lawsuit — the mid-year window closed Aug. 20 — but its findings offer one of the clearest available looks at how concentrated AI music distribution may already be among self-identified AI creators.
To understand how representative that 77.6% figure is, though, we need to know how many of the 1,743 submissions included distributor data. The report doesn’t specify that denominator.
Suno’s dominance grew even stronger, but pre-V6.
Suno moved from 90.4% of submitted tracks to 92.8%. BandLab is still No. 2 at 3.4%. ElevenLabs, Udio, Soundraw and Moises are all still under 1%. ChatGPT‘s presence in creator workflows fell from about one in five to 16.3%.
In the Q1 report, the ElevenLabs and Udio presence were seen as a signal of where the next adoption wave could come from. Five months later, that diversification hasn’t materialized. The mid-year report now speculates that the next shift will likely come from outside the current field entirely.
That reversal is itself revealing. Rather than fragmenting as more tools entered the market, the SIQA creator cohort became even more concentrated around its dominant platform.
The underlying fact deserves its own story: 93% of a verified creator cohort depends on one company’s licensing posture, pricing and legal exposure. That isn’t much of a competitive market. It makes Suno something closer to a piece of infrastructure for this particular creator ecosystem.
And every one of those submissions predates the last three weeks. SIQA’s window closed before Suno launched v6 and begun retiring its previous models entirely, alongside changes to download limits and terms of service. The 92.8% describes a cohort working on tools that are now being sunset, under conditions that have since changed. Whether that share holds through the next reporting period is the first real test of whether this is loyalty or lock-in.
The longest run in AI music chart history belongs to a major label.
Q1 named nine artists who charted in all nine weeks and called them the artists worth watching. In mid-year’s durability table, five of them — angelbaby, Breaking Rust, Yunna Serene, Aventhis and Solomon Ray — don’t appear. Jacub, who earned a full feature page in Q1 for charting after IFPI Sweden ruled him ineligible, is absent entirely.
What replaced them is the story. Q1’s durability record was Thompsxn Therapy‘s seven consecutive weeks at No. 1, which SIQA called the first sustained No. 1 in AI music chart history. In the mid-year period, The Second Voice held No. 1 for 14 straight weeks — double that, and more than two-thirds of the 20-cycle window. It’s the longest run SIQA has ever recorded, and it belongs to a Warner Music act.
SIQA’s framing is that the industry arrived. The sharper version is that the industry arrived and immediately set the endurance record, in a period where the independent cohort that Q1 identified as career-track largely didn’t return.
What this actually means
The Q1 report argued that the industry’s AI music decisions over the next 24 months would be made with data or without it. That was the right frame, and SIQA has done more than anyone to build the alternative. Mid-year is the report that makes it real — mainstream appearances on the SIQA chart are now a reality the industry can point to.
And with a second reporting period, the value of that work changes. SIQA isn’t just producing snapshots anymore. It is beginning to produce a timeline.
That timeline shows an ecosystem changing shape. Participation is still growing in absolute terms, but happening at a slower weekly pace. Gospel is gaining ground near the top of the chart. Suno’s already overwhelming position has strengthened, while DistroKid’s share of submissions with distributor data keeps climbing. And the artists who looked most durable in the first quarter have not, at least yet, settled into an equally durable career tier.
Some of the underlying methodology will need to evolve with that ecosystem. That’s inevitable for a framework attempting to measure a category that is changing this quickly, and particularly important now that SIQA has launched a Verified Registry built on top of those classifications.
The mid-year report is the best available picture of this category. But what makes it more valuable than the first report isn’t just what it captures on its own. Put the two together and, for the first time, we can see movement.
🆕 New AI Music Releases
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Albums/EPs
All Is Wild - eXperiMENTAL ARt (Experimental / pop / dance / rock)
FRANKIEVXXX - What the Body Knows (Alt-Pop)
Nicola Nicoletti - Blurred (Pop)
Singles
All Is Wild - “Saga (In Loving Memory)” (Pop)
Amanda Magellan - “Servo Memory” (Cinematic Cyberpunk)
Dante Villada - “¡RamBamBaa!” (Reggaeton)
Honest Bob - “The Space Between Us” (Rock / Alternative)
Honest Bob - “Say It Till The End” (Singer-songwriter / folk)
Honest Bob - “Sad Songs” (Rock / Alternative)
Ione - “Crypts Below (Live from Banfest)” (Rock / Alternative)
Lowan Wolf - “Still Choosing You” (Singer-songwriter / Pop)
Pina Punk Cat - “Pressure Proof” (Electronic / Dance)
Music Videos
Vanyra X - “Break the Pattern” (Pop)
🎧 Song of the Day: “Pressure Proof” by Pink Puna Cat
A defiant anthem about turning pressure into fuel, “Pressure Proof” doesn’t just survive the setbacks — it builds its strength from them. Every hit becomes another reason to stand taller, push harder, and make more noise.
💬 Last Word
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— Pablo Picasso
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Interesting report!
1,743 submissions from 800+ artists is not even a tiny fraction of what Suno's reported 2M subscribers (as of February) create, nor of the 75k+ daily AI track uploads that Deezer reported in April.
There's something that AI enables that these charts and reports don't and can't capture- everyone can make music, but most of this music never sees the light of day. What people do with the music they made is incredibly varied. Most don't do anything with it. It never reaches anyone besides themselves or maybe a friend or two. Some try to get it out, most fail. How many tried to get it on charts? A tiny sub fraction.
This is such a rich and varied world that any one slice of it is bound to miss huge swaths of the story. The one exception to that is the Suno cut. You see them everywhere because most people still use their models. That's bound to change though.. other models are catching up, and artists will discover more ways to get creative.