Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento

In announcing the new policy, the platform states that this is an essential step to quote, putting human creativity first.

In contrast, Spotify, the biggest streaming service in the world, has faced criticisms in recent months for not clearly labeling or flagging music created with generative AI.

Two major labels, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, have also signed licensing deals with AI music generators.

Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento, NPR News.

This past year in particular, there's been an uptick where I feel like every time there's a really big thing happening in the news, ICE raids, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, these have all been moments where I've seen a lot of people use songs and in particular these very like folk

plain spoken guitar driven songs on social media as a way to kind of respond to these moments.

It's like a throwback to what we think of as like Vietnam War singer-songwriter era protest music.

So why is this new version of protest music going viral?

Stomp Clap 2.0 era is here.

Ah!

We had like the Lumineers and Mumford and Sons, like this is the new version of that, I feel like.

Yeah, there's three main artists that I've been sort of keeping tabs on.

The first one is Jesse Wells.

He's an Arkansas singer-songwriter.

He's often compared to like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan.

His whole thing is singing the news.

So he's cranking these songs out.

Like, you know, he's made songs about what's happening in Gaza, about the Trump administration's trying to draw links between Tylenol use and autism.

there's two other artists one of them is Monrovia he's an Afro-Appalachian singer that also has this very sort of earthy folk sound his music is really about identity in a lot of ways but also protests oppression and the government and like a lack of collective care and empathy in today's society do you see the man on the street just fighting for immunity you can write him off as a lunatic but

And then the third one is Jensen McRae.