Why Session Musicians Are Losing Publishing Royalties in 2026

Session guitarists built the sound of modern music. The royalty system was never designed to pay them. Here's the structure of that failure and what changes it.

Tommy Tedesco played guitar on an estimated 5,000 recording sessions. Hal Blaine drummed on more than 35,000 recordings. Carol Kaye's bass lines underpin records that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. Most of what these musicians earned came from a flat session fee. They received no ongoing royalty as those records sold, streamed, and licensed.

That was the deal. Work for hire. You play, you get paid once, the label keeps everything downstream. It was the standard arrangement for studio musicians from the 1950s onward, and it was explicitly structured that way by people who understood the value of what they were capturing and preferred not to share it.

In 2026, the same structure is still running. It is just running in a new context, at a scale the original architects of work-for-hire could not have imagined.

The two-track royalty system and why it matters

Music royalties flow through two separate tracks that most people conflate: publishing royalties (for the composition) and master royalties (for the sound recording).

When a song streams on Spotify, roughly half the payment goes to the rights holder of the master recording, and roughly half goes to the songwriters and publishers via mechanical and performance royalties. Session musicians are almost never on either side of this split.

The master recording belongs to whoever paid for the session, typically the label. Session musicians signed away any ownership claim to the master as a condition of getting hired. The composition copyright belongs to the songwriter and their publisher. Session musicians are not songwriters by default — they play what they are given, and unless they contributed to the composition in a legally recognized way, they have no stake in the publishing.

Performance royalties for the master recording do exist in some jurisdictions. In the United States, there are no terrestrial broadcast performance royalties for master recordings at all — a legal carve-out that was grandfathered in at the lobbying of broadcasters and has never been reversed. Digital streaming platforms do generate master performance royalties, but those go to the master rights holder, not the individual performers.

"The session fee was never the problem. The problem was that the fee was designed to be the entirety of the payment, forever, while the record kept generating revenue for everyone else."

— Jason Colapietro

Where AI makes the problem structurally worse

Generative AI introduces a new layer of value extraction that the existing royalty system has no mechanism to address.

When a music AI model is trained on session recordings, it learns the stylistic vocabulary of those recordings: the phrasing, the tone, the timing, the technique. That vocabulary becomes a capability the model can deploy on demand. Producers who previously hired session guitarists can now generate approximations of session guitar performance at essentially no marginal cost.

The session guitarist's labor went into the training data that made this possible. The session guitarist receives nothing from the commercial deployment of that capability. This is not a hypothetical future scenario. It is the current operational reality of music production in 2026.

The AFM (American Federation of Musicians) has negotiated some protections around AI use for union members. Non-union session work has no equivalent protection. Independent session musicians — the guitarists recording remotely through platforms like AirGigs, SoundBetter, and direct client relationships — are operating with no contractual protection against their work entering AI training datasets and displacing their future employment.

The metadata gap at the center of it

The royalty system cannot route money to session musicians it cannot identify. This is not a new problem, but AI has made it acute.

Historically, session musicians were identified in liner notes and AFM contracts. Neither travels with the digital file. The MP3 of a 1972 recording that is streaming today carries no machine-readable indication of who played guitar on it. The session contract from that date may or may not be findable in anyone's archive. The musician may or may not still be reachable.

For contemporary independent sessions, the problem is different but equally structural. A producer hires a session guitarist through an online platform, pays a flat fee, receives the files, and distributes the recording. The recording metadata that goes to the DSP rarely includes the session musician's name in any field that generates a payment or searchable record. There is no standard field for "session performer" that any major streaming platform routes money through.

"The metadata gap is not a technical accident. It is the predictable outcome of a system designed to capture value at the top, not distribute it at the source."

— Jason Colapietro, Suede Labs AI

What session musicians can do now

• Negotiate explicit AI carve-outs in session contracts. Any agreement that covers "all uses" or "any medium now known or hereafter devised" is broad enough to cover AI training. A specific carve-out requiring separate negotiation for AI training use is now a standard clause worth requesting.
• Register your own reference recordings. Even if you cannot register the master you were hired to play on, you can register your own practice recordings, demos, and reference takes. These establish a provenance record for your playing style and technique.
• Document your session work with timestamped records. Contracts, session notes, correspondence, and reference files with verifiable timestamps create the evidentiary foundation for any future attribution or compensation claim.
• Build a public provenance record for your catalog. A registry-backed record linking your name to specific works, regardless of whether you own the master, creates a searchable connection that can be referenced in licensing and attribution discussions.

The session musician problem is not going to be solved by the existing industry structure. The same parties who benefited from work-for-hire arrangements for seventy years are not going to redesign those arrangements voluntarily. The solution is infrastructure that makes provenance unavoidable — records that connect performance to performer at the moment of creation, before the work enters a pipeline designed to strip that connection out.

Build that record now. The alternative is a future in which your playing is everywhere and your name is nowhere.

Start at suedeai.ai, or join the conversation on Suede Social.

Further Reading

See also: How to Register a Guitar Riff as Intellectual Property, Rights Metadata Is the Dark Matter of the Creative Economy, Who Owns the Output Stage.