The artist's voice and face are not raw material
An artist's voice and likeness are the most valuable and most protected assets in a music campaign. Tennessee's ELVIS Act, in force since 1 July 2024, added voice, including simulated voice, to the state's publicity rights and created liability for making unauthorised replicas available. California's AB 2602 (2024) makes contract clauses letting a digital replica replace work a performer would have done in person unenforceable where the intended uses are not reasonably specific and the performer had no lawyer or union representing them. Elsewhere, publicity, personality and data-protection rights point the same way. In practice: never clone a vocal, generate a face or build a 'performance' from an artist's recordings without a written agreement covering scope, media, territory, term and approval, and treat soundalikes of famous voices as the same risk.
Release campaigns, visualisers and canvases
A single release now needs a pre-save push, teasers, a visualiser or lyric video for YouTube, short vertical cuts for Reels, TikTok and Shorts, a Spotify Canvas, and localised versions for each market the label is working. Spotify's Canvas is a vertical loop of three to eight seconds in 9:16 that replaces the cover art in the Now Playing view while the track plays, so it has to hold attention as pure image. Visualisers suit generation well: abstract motion, textures and worlds built from the artwork, cut to the track's structure. Keep them tied to the release artwork so the campaign reads as one record, and check music rights for paid ads: the label may control the recording, but using the song in advertising usually needs the publisher's agreement too.
Cover art: specs and ownership
Cover art has to work at 3000x3000 pixels on a store page and as a tiny square in a playlist. Distributors and stores reject artwork that carries URLs, social handles, prices, store logos, other artists' names or misleading text, and they check that the artwork matches the release metadata. Ownership is the subtler issue. In the US, material generated without meaningful human authorship is not protected by copyright; the Copyright Office has said so repeatedly, and the courts upheld the principle in Thaler v. Perlmutter in 2025. A label that wants to stop others copying a cover, or to license it for merchandise, should keep a human-authored core, such as a photograph, illustration or typography, and use generation around it.
Approvals across artist, management and label
Music marketing has more stakeholders than most categories: the artist, their management, the label's marketing and legal teams, sometimes a publisher, a producer or a featured artist with their own approval rights. Contracts often give artists approval over images, biographies and how their likeness appears, and a featured artist's likeness needs that artist's own approval, not just the main artist's. Put those rules into the workflow rather than an email chain. The studio runs approvals with roles, sign-off and an audit trail, and records which model made every asset, so the label can show an artist exactly what was generated, by what, and who approved it.
Updated 25 September 2026 · General information, not legal advice. Rules change, so check the current text with your legal team before relying on it.