The AI Act In Plain Words: What It Asks Of Musicians, Agencies And Production Houses

HUZIP’s mail at the start of September put the AI Act in front of a lot of people who had never had a reason to open it. Much of what has been said about it since has been second-hand. Here is what the Regulation says, in normal words.

The part that concerns audio is one article

Article 50 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. It is about one thing: telling people when something was made by a machine. It has applied since 2 August 2026; other parts of the Act start later. One date is worth knowing: makers whose tools were already on the market before that day have until 2 December 2026 to add the watermark.

It puts duties on two roles, and only two

The first is whoever builds the tool. If a system generates synthetic audio, image, video or text, its maker has to mark the output so that software can recognise it as machine-generated. That is a watermark, and it is the tool maker’s job — Suno’s, OpenAI’s, ElevenLabs’. Nobody downstream has to do it for them.

The second is whoever uses such a tool in their work. They have to disclose it — but only when what comes out is a deep fake. The Regulation means something specific by that: content that resembles a real person, place, object or event and would plausibly be taken for the real thing. A cloned voice of a real presenter is the example the Commission’s guidelines themselves use.

It does not say “anything made with AI has to be labelled”. That is how it often gets paraphrased, and it is not in the text. The watermark covers everything a generator produces; the disclosure covers deep fakes only.

Who it does not touch at all

Nowhere does Article 50 place an obligation on a performer or on a phonogram producer, the label or whoever paid for the recording. Not to mark, not to declare, not to register anything. The article addresses tool makers and tool users, and that is the entire list.

If you are a musician

Article 50 asks nothing of you. What does ask something of you is your collecting society — see below. And if you use a generator yourself and the result imitates a real person, then you are the one using the tool, and the disclosure falls to you.

If you are an agency or a production house

The question is who decided that a generator would be used. The Commission’s guidelines from July 2026 are unusually clear here: a company that simply commissions an agency to make an advertisement, without deciding whether and how that agency uses AI, is not a tool user in the Act’s sense. The duty follows the decision, not the invoice. One thing the guidelines narrow: the softer rule for “evidently artistic” work does not automatically cover advertising. Content that is purely commercial and recognisable as such does not qualify, and an advertisement counts as a creative work only case by case.

Where HUZIP fits

HUZIP’s mail cites Article 50, but the field itself is not something the article requires. It is their own rule, and the reason for it is plain: they distribute performers’ money, a generated part had no performer behind it, and under the Croatian Copyright Act a performer is a person. It binds their members, and only in the act of registering a recording. It is a different question with a different answer.

Where this lands on your desk

If you are registering a recording with HUZIP, the mandatory field is called „Način sudjelovanja“ (manner of participation) and one of its options is „AI generirano“. It is filled in per role and per instrument, so a generated part is flagged on that part rather than on the whole recording. Their notice of 4 September 2026 also says what happens if a flag is false or missing: payment on the disputed recordings is temporarily blocked, proceedings against the person who filed can follow, and money already paid out can be claimed back.

If a disclosure does fall to you under Article 50, paragraph 5 says when and how: clearly and distinguishably, at the latest the first time the content is shown or heard. The Commission’s guidelines expect whoever carries that duty to take proportionate steps to push it through the chain, for instance in the contract with whoever distributes the work.

In one sentence

Article 50 asks tool makers to watermark, asks people who make deep fakes to say so, and asks performers and producers nothing at all.

One more thing from the studio side. The HUZIP field is there because HUZIP collects for performers, role by role, and a generated part has no performer in it. So a wholly generated track is not something a performer registers; there is nothing on it to claim. We have been seeing more people take that track a different way: they bring it in as a sketch and have it played and sung by people, who then register what they performed. Any part that stays generated stays flagged. What the re-recording itself involves, we wrote about last month.

This is not legal advice. For a specific campaign, ask your lawyer. Sources: Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 50; the Commission’s guidelines on transparency obligations, July 2026; the Code of Practice on transparency of AI-generated content; and HUZIP’s notice of 4 September 2026.