The first AI Music Awards set a Los Angeles ceremony with 25 award categories

The first AI Music Awards will be held at The Mayan in downtown Los Angeles on 13 November, and the organisers say the acts being honoured will appear on stage. SIQA, which styles itself The Sonic Intelligence Academy, is running the ceremony and describes it as the first show of its kind. It will be streamed worldwide.

The billing is where the trouble starts. SIQA says the night will carry hybrid human and AI showcases with a live band and immersive visuals, and that the creators behind each act will be directing the stage. What it has not said is how the vocals of acts that exist only as generated recordings reach an audience in a room. Music Business Worldwide, reporting the plan, noted that it had covered the same gap before: music made on platforms such as Suno arrives with no artist to tour and no stage to build.

The performers announced so far are Xania Monet, Olivia B Moore, Chaisen Hale, EJ Rogers and Sheena Taylor, with Godfellow and Aries Ivory also listed on the awards website. More names and celebrity appearances are promised in the weeks before the show.

Xania Monet is the best known of them and the reason the event has any commercial weight at all. The act was built by the songwriter Telisha Jones, who fed her own poetry into Suno to produce How Was I Supposed To Know?, and was then signed by Neil Jacobson's Hallwood Media after a bidding war that reportedly reached three million dollars. Jones told the Wall Street Journal last year that she grew up singing in church but could not deliver vocals as powerful as the ones she created.

Awards will be handed out in 25 categories. The top four are AI Song of the Year, AI Artist of the Year, AI Album of the Year and AI Producer of the Year, with ten genre categories underneath them covering R&B, country, gospel, pop, rock and alt, hip-hop, jazz, musical theatre, comedy and international music. SIQA will also present a first Visionary Award. Winners are picked by verified artists on the SIQA registry rather than by chart performance, which the company sums up as peers honouring peers.

SIQA is backed by the 1517 Fund and runs what it calls the music industry's first AI music charts, launched earlier this year. On 10 September it announced a verified registry and a companion app for logging how much AI went into a track. Of 1,551 AI tracks submitted to its charts in the first quarter of the year, 90.4 percent were made with Suno and 75.8 percent were distributed through DistroKid. Sponsors include the voice AI platform Deepgram, whose chief executive Scott Stephenson framed the involvement around trust and transparency.

Tickets are 250 dollars, the venue is capped at 600 seats and SIQA says fewer than 100 of those went on public sale. That scale is worth holding next to the wider argument: the same month, Spotify said it would flag AI artists and hold them back from recommendations, labels have been proposing rules for AI tracks on the charts, and Beatport went further and banned AI-generated tracks outright. An awards show is one of the few places in the business currently arguing the other way. Dates and slates for the rest of the season sit on award watch.