Layer 01 · The keystone
For centuries, every serious piece of gold and silver has carried a hallmark: small stamps that say who made it, where, and what it is made of. Not a grade. Not a judgement. A record of making. Music can carry one too.
What the mark records
For each part of the work (words and melody, voice, instruments, production and mix, artwork): roughly how much came from human hands and how much from AI tools. Rough is fine. A fair estimate beats false precision.
Which tools were used and for what, recorded as plain data. Where a tool's training arrangements are known (licensed catalogues, settled deals), that goes in the record too, as a fact rather than a verdict.
The human decisions that shaped the result: the takes rejected, the lines rewritten, the direction given. This is where the craft lives, whatever the tools.
One mark, made once, answers every form downstream: the AI questions streaming services now ask, the eligibility questions charts now ask, the credit line on a poster. Fill it in at release and forget about it.
Try the dial
Move the sliders the way you actually work. Watch which band the work lands in. There are no right answers on this instrument, only accurate ones.
Overall band for the first slider:
Human-led
Human hands nearly all the way through. The mark shows it, plainly, and it counts for plenty with plenty of people.
A person drives; tools assist. Most music made this decade will live here, whether or not anyone says so out loud.
The tools generate; a person directs, selects and shapes. Directing well is a craft of its own, and the mark gives it a name instead of a shadow.
Machine-made, human-published. Rare today, worth naming accurately rather than pretending it does not exist.
The bands are descriptions, not ranks. Listeners, venues, charts and stations each choose what any band means to them. That choice sits with them, where it belongs.
Where it fits
The wider industry moved through 2025 and 2026. Streaming services added AI credit fields to the data standard releases ship in. Since 31 August 2026 the ARIA charts exclude recordings that are "not substantially human created", assessed from answers given with every submission. Different doors now ask the same question in different words.
The mark answers all of them from one record. It maps onto the streaming credit fields, the chart submission forms and the simple labels listeners see, so a maker writes the facts down once instead of five times in five formats.
If a mark is ever doubted, the disagreement will be handled with evidence, and the outcome published. taking shape
The first full catalogue is being marked now: 129 songs across 8 albums by an Australian artist releasing since 2024, live on the major streaming services. When it is done, every song's mark will be public, as the worked example the standard ships with. taking shape