No listener has to choose a single AI track for your client to earn less. The track only has to get paid.
aren't a price per play. Each platform pools its subscription and advertising revenue for the period, takes its cut, and splits the rest pro rata: every monetised stream is one claim on the pool, and a catalogue's payout is its share of all claims. The per-stream rate everyone quotes is an output of that division, never an input to it. Which gives the pool the property this whole module turns on: it is finite. Money in is set by subscribers and advertisers. New tracks bring new claims, not new money.
Pool dilution follows directly. Generative tools can produce a finished, plausible track for pennies, and a will carry it for not much more, so the supply side has exploded: not hundreds of new uploads a day but hundreds of thousands. If any of that volume gets monetised, the denominator grows, the per-stream rate falls, and every human catalogue earns less, even where not one of its listeners changed their behaviour. A client's streams can hold perfectly flat while the income line sinks. Detection is the weak link: a generated track isn't illegal, often isn't labelled, and sounds close enough to the cheap end of human production that catching it at upload is genuinely hard.
Fraud compounds it. A streaming farm's economics are simple: generate thousands of tracks at near-zero cost, point bot accounts at them, and harvest a share of a real pool with fake supply and fake demand at once. Every fraudulent monetised stream takes money out directly and enlarges the denominator for everyone else at the same time. AI didn't invent stream fraud; it removed the main constraint, which was the cost of making enough plausible tracks to spread the activity thin enough to hide.
One scope note before the money. The consent questions, who may train on whose recordings and what a cloned voice infringes, are covered in the module. This module follows the cheque: what dilution does to per-stream economics and catalogue models, and who gets paid as the licensing market forms above it.