CITY JAM Founder Says Artists' Original Sound Is What AI Music Cannot Speed Up

Blueprints can be copied, sound cannot

Villaceran says progress around AI is "all about speed, and about getting human creators back on track." She describes that task as "an art and a science of its own."

In her view, the process side of releasing music is the easy part. "Anyone can copy a blueprint: the roadmap, the pipeline, the scheduling and the workflows," she said. "But you cannot force the sound to come out if it has to be an original sound." The company's release states that a release plan can be written down, handed to anyone and run by software, while the sound cannot.

CITY JAM says its expertise lies in how to bring out and evoke insights from musicians and creatives. That is the work done by its INDUSTRY.AIFF and CREATOR LABS offerings.

The numbers behind the flood of tracks

The release cites several figures to show how quickly supply has grown. 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, which the release calls 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 account for 1 to 3% of streams on Deezer, and up to 85% of those streams were fraudulent in 2025. According to the release, the flood is in uploads, not listening.

A study by CISAC and PMP Strategy projects that generative AI "could put 24% of Music creators' revenues at risk in 2028." The release stresses that this is a projection.

Regulators look at streaming fraud

The US Copyright Office has opened an inquiry into music streaming fraud. In its Federal Register notice, it names "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.

CITY JAM says detection and enforcement sit with regulators and streaming services. Its own work comes earlier, in the stretch between signing an artist and a finished record. The company argues that the royalty pool is diluted by volume without an audience, and that fully finished, genuine releases are what the pool is meant for.

What INDUSTRY.AIFF offers labels

INDUSTRY.AIFF is aimed at record labels and artist services companies. It takes a label's signed-but-unfinished artists to catalog-ready work and stays with them through launch. The program is part of an AI-era accelerator and incubator model for music that Villaceran launched on October 9, 2026, starting with record labels.

Artists receive the kind of support a startup accelerator gives founders. Education and professional development sit alongside community and live jam sessions, and collaborations, commercial opportunities and technology are included. INDUSTRY.AIFF is also the name of CITY JAM's weekday letter for music label CEOs.

CREATOR LABS, by contrast, is a separate support system for independent musicians and is not part of INDUSTRY.AIFF. CITY JAM, a brand of HINABI PRIVE, INC., describes itself as end-to-end infrastructure for the music industry. Villaceran also founded the innovation agency The MooVe.

What it means for labels and artists

Villaceran's argument is that if speed is no longer the hard part, the artist's own sound becomes the answer to what music is for. Once that sound has been drawn out of the musician, she says, the speed AI brings can serve an original sound instead of replacing it.

For labels, the pitch is a structured route from signed artist to finished release. The claims about the approach come from CITY JAM itself, and the release offers no outcome data for the program.