The Provenance Settlement Layer (PSL): Binding Content Provenance to Auditable Royalty Settlement in the Licensed AI Music Economy
Аннотация
Between 2024 and 2026 the recorded music industry moved from litigation against generative AI music services toward licensing them. Two major label groups settled with the leading services and announced licensed platforms; a third continues to litigate, with a fair use ruling anticipated in 2026 that may set precedent well beyond music. Yet the settlements have exposed, rather than resolved, the structural problem beneath the disputes. Content provenance standards and watermarking can now mark a synthetic track and identify its generating system, but no public framework specifies what happens after the mark: how a provenance record translates into a royalty split, how the resulting money is distributed to the rights holders whose works were licensed, and how that distribution can be audited by the artists and songwriters at the end of the chain. The consequences of this missing layer are already documented: one leading service has been rebuilt as a closed platform whose outputs cannot leave it, because off-platform settlement cannot yet be performed, and a musicians' union has sued two major label groups over the distribution of AI settlement money itself. This paper proposes the Provenance Settlement Layer (PSL), a three-stage framework that binds a signed generation attestation to deterministic, machine-readable royalty routing and to an append-only, artist-auditable distribution log, with the resulting records designed to support rebuttable evidentiary presumptions in dispute. The PSL is presented as a conceptual architecture requiring industry calibration, not as a validated standard. Its purpose is stated plainly: that in a licensed synthetic music economy, the right should reach the rightful holder, and should be provable when it does.