Guest blog: From Piracy to AI: How Music Keeps Paying for ‘Innovation’

In late 2024, Charlene Hegarty was appointed as the first permanent Musicians Union officer in Northern Ireland.

Her music industry career began in gusto at the age of 17; she performed roles in publicity and tour management, working campaigns for Tom Waits (Anti), Presidents of the United States of America (Columbia), Frank Turner (Interscope), Fighting With Wire (Atlantic) and Devotchka (Anti).

In 2011, Charlene set up Smalltown America Music (STAM), a dynamic young full service-publishing wing of Smalltown America Records, a DIY punk rock record label. During Charlene’s tenure, STAM internationally serviced the copyrights for 26 individual music projects and her natural flare for developing talent and creating business opportunity is evidenced in the global licensing contracts she brokered with MTV, Toyota, Vodafone, O2 and Emmy and Annie nominated Netflix series 'Puffin Rock' which was a first of its kind collaboration with the Ulster Orchestra.

Following that, Charlene led the talent development efforts at Oh Yeah Music Centre from 2017 to 2024, supported by PRSF and YouTube Music. During her tenure she helped support and develop a range of artists from across Northern Ireland who went on to win multiple awards, ink global publishing deals, record deals and perform to growing fan bases at home and abroad.

Alongside her efforts at Oh Yeah she established her own management company 'Zero Myth' with a specialism in artist friendly development work. She was the first Irish manager accepted onto the MMF Accelerator programme in 2022 and her roster included Kitt Philippa, Thom Southern, New Pagans, Gemma Bradley and The Darkling Air.

In 2023 she became the first Northern Irish voice on the UK Music Futures Board - a board she continues to serve on to ensure the needs of musicians from Northern Ireland are represented.

Below she outlines the impact of AI on music and what that might mean for the future.

In Oppenheimer, there’s a moment when the scientists behind the atomic bomb gather to celebrate. Flags wave, applause thunders, and yet Oppenheimer’s face is haunted. The achievement was historic, but the consequences were unimaginable. Humanity had crossed a threshold — brilliance measured not by reflection, but by destination.

It's a story as old as humanity itself. Thanks to my friend and font of wisdom Paul Kane, Music and Older Peoples Manager at the Oh Yeah Music Centre, I was tipped off on the 5-part documentary ‘Human’ on the BBC iPlayer. The super impressive Ella Al-Shamahi walks us through our past and I found parallels to the present moment. Tens of thousands of years ago, the first humans developed the tools, fire, and hunting strategies that gave them dominance over the natural world. Within a blink of evolutionary time, the mammoths, giant sloths, and saber-toothed cats were gone. The pattern repeats: each leap forward in power comes with triumph in the moment, and only later — sometimes too late — do we grasp the true cost.

Today, AI is dazzling us with another leap. AI can compose music, generate lyrics, and produce fully-formed tracks in seconds, something I discussed on BBC Radio Ulster just a few weeks ago. To some, it feels like magic. To others, it feels like déjà vu: the excitement of progress racing ahead of the conversation about consequences. For me, it feels like repetition and lack of consideration.

And this matters profoundly for culture.

Music has always been a deeply human expression, built on sweat, skill, and the messy spark of creativity. But in the AI age, we risk reducing it to a prompt and a click. Already, we see platforms experimenting with AI-generated music libraries, sometimes trained on the work of real musicians without their knowledge or consent. This is something the Musicians Union strongly stands against in our fight for consent, credit and fair remuneration. Let it be said, the technology is not the enemy — just as fire, or nuclear fission, or hunting tools weren’t inherently bad. The danger comes when we celebrate what the tool can do without asking what it should do — and who is left behind.

Streaming gives us another cautionary tale. In the early 2000s, piracy threatened to collapse the recorded music industry altogether. Spotify and other platforms offered a solution: instant access, vast libraries, and a legal alternative to illegal downloads. And it worked — piracy plummeted. But the unintended consequences have been stark. Today, most streaming revenues flow to the biggest rights-holders and a tiny fraction of superstar artists. For the vast majority of working musicians, per-stream payments are so low they barely register. That’s why the Musicians’ Union is campaigning through the government’s Creator Remuneration Working Group, pushing for a fairer deal for musicians and music creators.

What began as a fix to piracy has hardened into a new imbalance — one where the value of music is still vast, but the distribution of that value is profoundly unfair. Once again, we celebrated the destination (access, convenience, growth) without fully considering the cost to the people making the music itself.

Pop culture has been warning us of this for decades. In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum’s character delivers the immortal line: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The dinosaurs were impressive; the fallout was catastrophic. In Black Mirror, we see futures where technology fulfils its promise — and obliterates the humanity it was meant to serve. We laugh nervously because it feels so close to home.

For musicians, the stakes are high. AI threatens not only to undercut livelihoods but also to strip away the recognition and fairness that underpin cultural work. If AI models are trained on countless songs without consent, the artists who poured their lives into those works are effectively erased. We risk building a future where the “destination” — infinite cheap content — is prized above the value of human artistry.

But unlike the megafauna or Hiroshima, this story is not finished. We have the chance, right now, to reflect before the damage is irreversible. That means asking serious ethical questions about how AI is developed and deployed in the creative industries. It means building rules that ensure musicians and creators are fairly compensated when their work is used to train or feed new technologies. It means insisting that technology serves humanity, not the other way around.

There is a path forward that balances innovation with fairness. AI can be a powerful tool for musicians — helping with workflow, education, or experimentation — without replacing or exploiting them. But that balance won’t happen by accident. It requires the will to stop, reflect, and act.

History shows us what happens when we don’t. The applause comes first, the consequences later. If we want music — and culture itself — to remain human at its core, we must resist the urge to simply marvel at the tool. We must decide what kind of future we want it to build.

Because progress without reflection isn’t really progress at all.

P.s I was more of a Barbie girl.