The Record Contract Reached Its AI Deadline.

01

What the agreement actually sets

Under the published rates, a basic regular session pays a side musician $488.29 for a three-hour minimum during which no more than fifteen minutes of music may be recorded. That fifteen-minute cap is the part outsiders miss: the session is not merely time, it is a limit on how much finished music can be extracted from that time.

Around that number sits the rest of the machinery — an additional 20 per cent of scale for the first double and 15 per cent for each additional instrument, a health and welfare contribution per service, pension contributions, and the music-preparation classifications that pay arrangers, orchestrators and copyists by the page.

02

Three words at the table

The union's AI position has been reduced to consent, compensation and credit: consent before a musician's work is used for machine learning or imitation, compensation when it is, and credit identifying the players involved. Alongside it sit conventional demands for higher wages and broader access to health and retirement benefits.

These are bargaining positions. No successor text has been ratified, and until one is, claims that the industry either secured or defeated any particular AI protection run ahead of the record.

03

What an extension does

Extending existing rates while negotiations continue keeps the operating rulebook alive and avoids a gap in minimum scales. It is unglamorous and it protects working players in the interim.

It also functions as a clock. Each published extension carries an end date, and each end date is a point at which the parties either agree, extend again, or escalate. The publicly circulated rate packet runs through 31 July 2026, so any work after that has to be checked against whatever succeeded it — a further extension, a ratified agreement, or an employer-specific arrangement.

04

The argument that moved to court

The most consequential development is not at the bargaining table. In June 2026 the AFM sued Universal and Warner, alleging that the labels breached the SRLA when they settled their copyright claims against AI music companies and then licensed their catalogues to those same companies for AI training — without compensating or informing the session musicians who played on the recordings.

The union's theory rests on the agreement's existing new-use provision: if a record company uses a sound recording in a new way not covered by the agreement, an obligation to compensate the musicians on that recording still arises. The AFM has argued that reading the clause any other way is nonsensical; the labels have contended the provision cannot function as the union describes. An amended complaint followed in July.

The claim is untested. But it reframes the whole dispute — because if it succeeds, session musicians have a route to payment from AI licensing that does not depend on winning a copyright case or on a successor agreement being signed at all.

05

Why this is the contract to watch

Almost every public argument about AI and music concerns ownership: who holds rights in the training data, who owns the output. The SRLA is about employment, and it governs the people who have no ownership stake in either.

A session violinist does not own the recording. Under a copyright framework they have no standing at all when that recording is licensed for training. Under an employment agreement with a new-use clause, they might. That is why the terms of this contract, and the litigation about what its existing terms already require, matter more to working players than any of the headline copyright cases.

What remains unpublished is most of it: the proposals exchanged, the labels' counteroffers, and any final AI language. Until a ratified text appears, the honest position is that the outcome is unknown.