A Swedish organisation representing musicians said it signed the "world's first collective AI licence for music", aiming to compensate artists for use of their work in training artificial intelligence.
Non-profit group STIM said it had signed the deal to license music to an AI company under a "pilot project" with two startups, Songfox and Sureel.
STIM already collects royalties from businesses such as radio stations and distributes them to artists.
Its new system allows the AI companies to train their models on licensed works while paying royalties to the creators.
"We've created a licence model that enables us to respond to AI developments without compromising the rights of music creators," said STIM's interim chief executive Lina Heyman, in a statement from the company.
The rise of music generated using artificial intelligence has prompted artists to fear they could be drowned out by a flood of AI-composed songs.
A study published in December by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), which represents more than five million creators worldwide, forecast that artists could see their incomes shrink by more than 20% in the next four years as the market for AI-composed music grows.
STIM said that under its licensing model creators would also be compensated when new works that are "influenced" by their work are created and used.
The human-created work that influenced an AI creation would be detected using "independent attribution technology", its statement said.
In the first phase, only a limited number of works from rights holders who had "explicitly opted in" would be included.
