Gareth Emery has officially put his money where his mouth is on the AI music debate. The veteran British trance DJ and producer has launched a brand-new record label called Emotional Intelligence Records, dedicated to AI-free, human-made music and artwork only.
The launch sits under the umbrella of his ongoing LSR/CITY project. As the industry rushes to embrace generative AI tools, the trance veteran is moving the opposite direction, intentionally curating a small corner of the internet where every release is verified human-made. The label’s debut single is LSR/CITY‘s ‘Burn It Down’, available to pre-save now.
The announcement came alongside one of the most direct anti-AI statements from a mainstream electronic artist this year. The British producer opened his post with a wide-angle warning about where streaming and AI are taking the industry.
Gareth Emery wrote “It seems we’re heading toward a world of fake artists, fake voices, stolen training data, and a streaming economy where the key players seem happy to bury human music under infinite synthetic slop. If that happens, who wins?”
The trance star distinguished cleanly between AI as a creative tool and AI as a substitute for the artist. Using AI to solve a maddening Ableton issue is fine, the British producer wrote. Generating a whole song based on someone else’s stolen life’s work is not. “I believe there is a human energy that flows through human-made work, and even if we can’t always prove it or explain it, we feel it. Imperfections aren’t the flaw, they’re proof a human was there. And I want to fight to preserve that.”
The veteran trance figure acknowledged the label is an uphill industry battle. The British producer flagged that the project will likely receive “negative zero industry support” and asked his audience directly to pre-save the debut single to give it momentum.
Beyond the AI debate, the launch reads as a personal artistic statement. The trance star said he discovered models being trained directly on his discography earlier this year, which prompted him to think seriously about how he felt about the wider AI shift in music. The result is a label that exists to defend human creators in a streaming economy increasingly stacked against them.
Demos and art submissions for Emotional Intelligence Records can be sent to demo@lsrcity.com.
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