Symphonic has partnered with ArtyShield to give its clients a set of tools built to protect their music and voices from unauthorized use by AI.
The collaboration makes ArtyShield’s technology available inside the Client Offerings section of SymphonicMS, the distribution company’s management platform, via single sign-on.
At the center of it is MusicShield, a tool designed to protect a recording before it is released.
According to ArtyShield, MusicShield modifies what the startup calls the “machine-perceived acoustic features” of a track in ways that are inaudible to human listeners. The aim is to make a recording harder for AI systems to interpret, learn from, or use in training, while leaving the listening experience unchanged.
Rather than flagging misuse after it has happened, MusicShield is pitched as a way for artists to act before their work is pulled into AI training datasets.
The technology isn’t new to the research world. MusicShield builds on HarmonyCloak, a tool developed in 2024 by a team led by Jian Liu — now ArtyShield’s Founder and CEO — during his time as a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, alongside PhD student Syed Irfan Ali Meerza and Lehigh University’s Lichao Sun. The work was presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
The underlying idea is to embed imperceptible noise that effectively tricks a generative model into treating a track as if there is nothing to learn from it, so that music trained on the protected file comes out degraded. It’s the audio counterpart to tools like Glaze and Nightshade, which visual artists have used to disrupt AI image generators.
Concerns about how AI companies source training data have grown in recent years. Hacked source code from AI music company Suno listed YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius among the platforms it scraped to build its AI models, as MBW reported.
Beyond MusicShield, the collaboration gives Symphonic clients access to the rest of ArtyShield’s AI tools.
“MusicShield was built around a simple idea: artists deserve meaningful protection before their work becomes part of AI systems.”
Jian Liu, ArtyShield
VeriTune analyzes recordings to assess whether a track may be AI-generated, while VoiceShield is built to protect vocal performances from voice cloning and synthetic speech. VeriVoice, meanwhile, is designed to identify AI-generated, cloned, or synthetically manipulated speech recordings.
ArtyShield is also preparing to launch ArtyShield Certify, a certification workflow intended to provide proof that a work is human-created for licensing, legal, and platform-verification purposes.
The company says it has more on the way. It’s working on tools to detect potential copyright infringement across large catalogs — including where tracks have been altered by speed changes, pitch-shifting, heavy editing, or AI remixing — as well as technology to flag AI-generated singing that closely resembles an existing artist’s voice.
Symphonic clients can start using ArtyShield for free, with paid tiers available for expanded protection.
“We believe AI can create tremendous opportunities for our industry, but those opportunities have to be built on consent, transparency, and respect for the people creating the music in the first place.”
Jorge Brea, Symphonic
“The conversation around AI shouldn’t begin after someone’s work has already been copied or misused. MusicShield is exciting because it gives creators a practical way to protect their music before that happens.
“We believe AI can create tremendous opportunities for our industry, but those opportunities have to be built on consent, transparency, and respect for the people creating the music in the first place,” said Jorge Brea, CEO of Symphonic.
“MusicShield was built around a simple idea: artists deserve meaningful protection before their work becomes part of AI systems,” said Jian Liu, Founder and CEO of ArtyShield.
“Working with Symphonic allows us to bring that protection directly into the release workflow, making it easier for creators to safeguard their music while also giving them tools to verify authenticity and protect their voices.”
The ArtyShield tie-up adds to Symphonic’s run of AI initiatives centered on creator consent.
The company has also worked with Sureel AI, owned by Warner Music Group, to let its artists track how their music is used by AI, with opt-out protections.
It has separately partnered with SourceAudio to offer an opt-in, licensed marketplace for AI training data.
Symphonic also launched an AI Release Campaign Builder, which generates marketing strategies based on an artist’s release goals and budget.
Music Business Worldwide