AI Made Music Fast. CITY JAM Founder Pat Villaceran Says the Real Asset Is the Artist's Own Sound

As AI music races on speed and volume, CITY JAM’s INDUSTRY.AIFF works on what no pipeline can force: drawing original sound out of human creators.

NEW YORK, Oct. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Generative AI has made music fast, and the race in AI music is now about speed and volume. Pat Villaceran, founder of CITY JAM, says that race leaves one input untouched: original sound from human creators. Drawing that sound out of artists is both an art and a science. It is the craft behind INDUSTRY.AIFF, which takes a label’s signed-but-unfinished artists to catalog-ready work and carries them through launch.

“When you stack up the progress around AI, it’s all about speed, and about getting human creators back on track. That is an art and a science of its own,” said Villaceran. “There are blueprints in it. Anyone can copy a blueprint: the roadmap, the pipeline, the scheduling and the workflows. But you cannot force the sound to come out if it has to be an original sound. The creativity is in how you bring out and evoke insights from musicians and creatives, and that is what CREATOR LABS and INDUSTRY.AIFF do. How you do that is the expertise we have at CITY JAM.”

In tech terms, the blueprint is the easy part. A release plan can be written down and handed to anyone. Software can run it. The sound, Villaceran says, cannot.

The figures show how fast supply has moved. Luminate’s 2025 Year-End Music Report counted 106,000 tracks a day reaching streaming services in 2025, up 7% on 99,000 a day in 2024. In 2025, 120.5 million of 253 million audio tracks had ten streams or fewer. That is almost half.

A growing share of that supply is not made by people. On Deezer, fully AI-generated tracks reached almost 75,000 a day in April 2026, roughly 44% of daily uploads, and passed 50% of new uploads at the June 2026 peak. Yet AI tracks are 1 to 3% of streams on Deezer, and up to 85% of those streams were fraudulent in 2025. On Deezer, the flood is in uploads, not listening.

The CISAC and PMP Strategy study projects that generative AI “could put 24% of Music creators’ revenues at risk in 2028.” That is a projection.

The US Copyright Office is now asking what that volume costs. Its inquiry into music streaming fraud names, in its Federal Register notice, “the dilution of the royalty revenue pool” as the primary harm, and asks which industry practices may be “inadvertently contributing to streaming fraud.” Initial comments are due November 23, 2026, and replies December 21, 2026.

Detection and enforcement sit with regulators and the streaming services. CITY JAM’s work sits earlier, in the stretch between signing an artist and a finished record. The royalty pool is diluted by volume without an audience. Fully finished, genuine releases are what the pool is for, and those still depend on an artist finding a sound of their own.

So if speed is no longer the hard part, what is music for? Villaceran’s answer is the artist’s own sound. It has to be drawn out of the musician. Then the speed AI brings can serve an original sound instead of replacing it.

INDUSTRY.AIFF does this for record labels and artist services companies. It works with their signed artists from unfinished work to catalog-ready releases, and stays with them through launch.

INDUSTRY.AIFF sits within the AI-era accelerator and incubator model for music that Villaceran launched on October 9, 2026, starting with record labels. Artists get the kind of support a startup accelerator gives founders. Education and professional development sit alongside community and live jam sessions. Collaborations and commercial opportunities come with it, and so does technology.

About CITY JAM

CITY JAM is holistic, end-to-end infrastructure for the music industry, built for everyone from independent musicians to record labels and artist services companies. It runs INDUSTRY.AIFF and CREATOR LABS with a global network of experts and producers, including CITY JAM New York. Pat Villaceran founded and leads CITY JAM. She also founded the innovation agency The MooVe, and has built innovation programs for companies and founders in Asia Pacific and the United States as well as in the United Kingdom and Europe. CITY JAM brings that record to music. INDUSTRY.AIFF is CITY JAM’s program for record labels and artist services companies, and the name of its weekday letter for music label CEOs. CREATOR LABS is a holistic support system for independent musicians. It is a separate offering and is not part of INDUSTRY.AIFF. CITY JAM is a brand of HINABI PRIVE, INC. For updates, follow CITY JAM on LinkedIn.

Media contact: CITY JAM, [email protected]

SOURCE CITY JAM