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Listeners engage less deeply with music attributed to AI than with music attributed to a human – even when the music is actually human-composed, a new peer-reviewed academic study has found.
The authors say their findings suggest “truthful attribution can have real consequences for how music is perceived and understood” – landing in the middle of an active industry debate over mandatory AI music disclosure.
The peer-reviewed paper, which you can read in full here, published in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications in March, was authored by Sarah H. Wu of Stanford University and Kevin J. Holmes of Reed College.
Various music streaming services have been rolling out their own AI labeling systems in recent months.
Apple Music launched its Transparency Tags system in March, asking labels and distributors to flag AI use at the point of delivery.
Spotify followed last month with the beta launch of AI Credits in song credits, similarly relying on labels and distributors to self-disclose AI use.
In late April, Spotify went further by introducing a new “Verified by Spotify” badge, with the streaming giant saying that profiles “that appear to primarily represent AI-generated or AI-persona artists” would not be eligible for verification.
“In the AI era, it’s more important than ever to be able to trust the authenticity of the music you listen to,” Spotify said in an accompanying blog post.
Deezer has gone further still – independently detecting and tagging AI music at the platform level, and now reporting that around 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks are uploaded to its service every day, making up roughly 44% of daily deliveries.
Earlier this month, music supervisor Frederic Schindler made the case in an MBW op-ed for an industry-wide “Music Facts” disclosure protocol modeled on FDA nutrition labels, with “AI Generated” listed as one of four mandatory origin categories.
The Wu and Holmes paper was based on two preregistered studies involving 399 US participants, who listened to instrumental music clips and reported whether they imagined a story while listening – a phenomenon the researchers describe as “narrative listening”.
In the first study, participants heard six human-composed pieces – including works by Beethoven, Mozart, Debussy and Ravel – without being told who or what had composed them.
The more strongly listeners believed a given piece was computer-generated, the less likely they were to imagine a story – and the less engaging the stories they did imagine were, according to Wu and Holmes.
“FALSELY FRAMING AI-GENERATED ART AS A HUMAN CREATION MAY ELICIT A GREATER SENSE OF MEANING – BUT AT A COST TO HUMAN CREATORS, DEPRIVING THEM OF CREDIT AND COMPENSATION FOR THE WORK FROM WHICH AI PRODUCTS ARE DERIVED.”
SARAH H. WU AND KEVIN J. HOLMES
In the second study, the researchers used eight pieces – four human-composed, four generated by AI software AIVA – and labeled each one either “Composer: Human” or “Composer: AI” while it played to the participant.
The “AI”-labeled pieces elicited fewer and less engaging imagined narratives than the “Human”-labeled pieces – regardless of who or what had actually composed the music, the Stanford and Reed researchers reported.
That suppression was nominally stronger when applied to actual AI compositions – suggesting listeners were also picking up on acoustic markers of AI on top of the labels themselves, according to Wu and Holmes.
“Attributing music to AI is associated with – and can engender – an impoverished listening experience, devoid of the mental narratives that unfold as the composer’s musical choices guide the listener’s imagination,” Wu and Holmes wrote.
The authors said the label effect appeared to be driven by listeners ascribing less communicative intention to pieces marked as AI-made. “Labeling music as AI composed, truthfully or otherwise, may lead listeners to infer that the music lacks meaning or intensity,” Wu and Holmes wrote.
“Attributing music to AI is associated with – and can engender – an impoverished listening experience, devoid of the mental narratives that unfold as the composer’s musical choices guide the listener’s imagination.”
SARAH H. WU AND KEVIN J. HOLMES
Those findings land alongside parallel research from Kiel and Hamburg economists Jana Friedrichsen, Julia Schwarz, and Michel Clement.
Their three-study working paper, not yet peer-reviewed, was summarized in ProMarket last Monday (May 4), and found that listeners’ willingness to pay for AI-generated music drops when its AI origin is disclosed – an effect mainly driven by pop listeners.
“Consumers can only make informed choices if artists and music platforms are transparent about the use of AI,” Friedrichsen, Schwarz and Clement wrote.
The Wu and Holmes paper opens with a reference to The Velvet Sundown, the “band” that surpassed 1 million monthly Spotify listeners in 2025 before its operators confirmed the music was AI-generated.
The authors describe one of The Velvet Sundown‘s songs as making “for an adequate road-trip soundtrack,” adding: “Much AI-generated music may go undetected because it is designed to blur the distinctive qualities of human-composed works, yielding a kind of algorithmically curated easy listening.”
For Wu and Holmes, that under-detection comes at a cost to human creators.
“Even though AI systems can produce works that look or sound impressive, audiences may engage with them in a rather shallow way, missing the human touch that makes art feel meaningful,” Wu and Holmes wrote.
Wu and Holmes added: “By the same token, falsely framing AI-generated art as a human creation may elicit a greater sense of meaning – but at a cost to human creators, depriving them of credit and compensation for the work from which AI products are derived.”
That risk to human creators was illustrated earlier this year by the case of Murphy Campbell, a North Carolina folk musician who discovered AI-cloned covers of her songs uploaded to her own Spotify profile, before a copyright troll claimed ownership of her legitimate YouTube recordings via gamma-owned distributor Vydia.
The scale of that harm extends far beyond Campbell‘s case. Sony Music Entertainment revealed at the launch of the IFPI‘s Global Music Report 2026 in March that it had asked streaming platforms to take down more than 135,000 songs created by fraudsters using generative AI to impersonate its artists.
Dennis Kooker, Sony Music‘s President of Global Digital Business and US Sales, said the deepfakes cause “direct commercial harm to legitimate recording artists.”
In a February MBW op-ed, IFPI CEO Victoria Oakley and RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier wrote that generative AI has “industrialized” streaming fraud.
Performance rights organization ASCAP, meanwhile, has been calling for transparency around AI use in musical works since 2023, when its board adopted six AI principles including a call to distinguish AI from human-generated works.
Concluding the paper, Wu and Holmes wrote: “For music to inspire our inner storyteller, it helps to know there’s a human mind behind it.”Music Business Worldwide
Millions of homeowners are clinging to their pandemic-era mortgage rates like castaways clutching driftwood. That stubbornness is resetting the rulebook for investors.
A new survey of 1,000 mortgage holders by Best Interest Financial and Clever Real Estate found that 35% of homeowners with a mortgage rate under 6% would not give it up for any reason whatsoever. Among those with rates under 3%, the figure jumped to 52%.
Nearly half—47%—of those surveyed said that they simply couldn’t afford a mortgage at today’s rates if they had to start over. The result is a housing market that, according to Fortune, has been frozen for three years.
Since 2022, annual home sales have dropped to their lowest level—approximately 4.1 million—since the mid-90s, when the U.S. population was 22% smaller, according to the Wall Street Journal.
There is a desperate need for more housing. However, according to data from Intercontinental Exchange cited by the Journal, 54% of primary homeowners are sitting on rates of 4% or lower—and, as the Best Interest Financial and Clever Real Estate survey discovered, many of them do not intend to sell.
For landlords currently sitting on rentals, here’s what that means: Every family priced out of buying is another family looking for a quality rental.
The Trump administration put the housing shortage at 10 million units, while Realtor.com and Zillow had it at half that amount last year.
It’s all about supply and demand. Demand far outweighs supply, which means landlords are sitting on one of this economy’s most prized assets: housing.
Said Dr. Jessica Lautz, NAR deputy chief economist, in a Realtor.com press release:
“For many younger households, affordability challenges and limited inventory are still making homeownership difficult to achieve. Older millennial buyers are now entering middle age, and with that comes a shift. This cohort is now the highest-earning generation of homebuyers, buys the largest homes, and is most likely to have children living with them. Those traits were once more commonly associated with Gen X buyers, who are now increasingly looking toward empty-nesting and retirement.”
However, further complicating the housing supply chain is that baby boomers, those aged 61-79, are transacting most of the real estate—accounting for 42% of buyers and 55% of sellers—leveraging their considerable home equity to do deals, leaving younger buyers locked out.
Added Lautz:
“Baby boomers are at a point in life when they have the flexibility to move, often with housing equity to help purchase their next home. In earlier years, baby boomers—like millennials today—may have moved because of a job change or the need for a larger home. Today, many baby boomers are embracing choice and moving to be closer to friends and family, to downsize, or to retire and enjoy a work-free lifestyle.”
With interest rates still in the low-6% range with no end in sight, it seems likely prospective buyers will remain renting for a while yet.
“We forecast that mortgage rates will range between 6% and 6.5% this year, and our latest weekly data show it’s trending towards the upper end of that range,” Mike Fratantoni, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association, told Bankrate.com in March.
While the Bankrate article alluded to a gradual crumbling of 3% interest rates as some owners were forced to sell due to growing families or job relocation requirements, it also quoted a report from insurance company First American that tied moving to a geographic location. Those in pricier states, such as California, were less likely to give up their low interest rates than those in less expensive locations.
You’ve probably heard mixed reviews about the current rental market. ApartmentList.com‘s April 2026 report shows that rents are up month over month but down 1.7% year over year. This is due in part to the sharp increase in rents after the pandemic, economic complications, affordability issues, and the war with Iran.
However, it’s probably a temporary situation, given the overwhelming lack of housing, which is likely pushing rents up, as it has in the past few months.
The most recent BiggerPockets Pulse survey showed a slight downturn in optimism among landlords, as evidenced by slight rental decreases over the past year. However, long-term, with low inventory, high rates, and high prices, holding rental property remains almost inflation-proof because people will always need a place to live.
“Real estate is in a recovery mode,” Henry Chin, global head of research for commercial brokerage CBRE, told US News & World Report, but adds that the focus has shifted from price appreciation to steady income. “Investors should look at cyclical and structural points of view to pick the right assets and locations.”
Regarding the economic uncertainty posed by the Iran war, Chin said, “Developed countries are front and center of investors’ minds as occupier demand continues to recover,” adding that the “U.S. is more resilient than Europe,” which is more dependent on overseas oil than the U.S.
Other experts interviewed in the same article concurred. “Interest rates are just one piece of the puzzle, not the defining factor,” says Edward F. Pierzak, senior vice president of research at Nareit (the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts). “What matters most is the broader economic backdrop.”
The sentiment was echoed by Roland Chow, financial planner and portfolio manager at Optura Advisors in Burlingame, California, who said, “Investors should think of real estate as a diversifier to the portfolio and, in the current higher-interest rate environment, as an income source and inflation hedge.”
With a continual housing bottleneck and homeowners reluctant to part with low rates, now is a great time to buy if you can. However, it’s not a case of blindly throwing a dart at a map of the country and picking a spot.
The U.S. housing market is not monolithic. While there are always fluctuating cities, by far the best places to invest today are generally in the Midwest and Sunbelt, according to a recent Zillow analysis—with a smattering in the Northeast—assuming you want to keep away from pricier metros such as San Jose, San Francisco, and the New York tristate area.
In the current economic climate, lower price points are a key driver. “A huge component of buyer friendliness is affordability,” Kara Ng, a senior economist at Zillow, told CNBC. ”[The Midwest] was affordable before the pandemic, and it is affordable after the pandemic.”
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They say most home sellers are also home buyers.
In other words, they aren’t just selling their property and disappearing into thin air.
Nor are they typically renting either. Often, they are selling one home and purchasing a replacement.
As such, there’s no inventory gain. There is no benefit to the housing market other than churn, which benefits those who get paid for the transaction.
Such as real estate agents, mortgage loan originators, title and escrow companies and so on.
Here’s the problem.
Given the lack of affordability and dearth of supply at the moment, sellers today don’t want to be buyers (and who can blame them).
Nobody wants to be a buyer right now. It’s tough out there. This is no secret.
As such, existing homeowners, who very likely hold cheap debt, a low loan balance, a low tax basis, and all the other benefits of having bought years ago, are very much “would-be sellers.”
I’ve spoken about this before. Sure, they will sell, but only at the right price.
And chances are that price doesn’t work for many buyers today because affordability is so poor.
To add insult to injury, the existing homeowner’s price must factor in the very real cost of the seller giving up their ultra-low mortgage rate and taking on a much higher rate on an even higher purchase price.
That tricky dynamic puts even more strain on already limited for-sale supply.
We underbuilt for many years post-early 2000s housing crisis, and this simply makes it worse.
It’s why home prices continue to stay stubbornly high despite affordability telling you they should fall.
If you’re a home buyer today, you need to look at things from the home seller’s perspective.
Many current homeowners are sitting on 3% 30-year fixed mortgages. Or even sub-3% mortgage rates.
Their monthly payment feels like a steal (and is) compared to what a new buyer would face at today’s rates.
If they sell today and buy again (which as I said most plan to do), they’re not only losing that low-rate mortgage, but also taking on a new loan at rates that are double (or more) than what they currently pay.
In addition, they’re paying a much higher price for their replacement home in a still-competitive market.
The math simply doesn’t pencil for a lot of sellers unless they get top dollar on their current property.
So they list for some exorbitant price and everyone tells them they’re listing way too high.
But they don’t really care. They are happy to stay put if they don’t get their price. They are “would-be sellers” with time on their side.
This allows them to list at an aspirational price and simply bide their time.
Even in normal times, homeowners are emotionally attached to their homes. And due to mortgage rate lock-in, they’re financially anchored as well.
The end result is pretty straightforward here.
A vicious cycle of limited for-sale inventory, high home prices, and a reluctance for more existing homeowners to sell.
If fewer homes hit the market because owners don’t want to trade in their 3% mortgage and its tiny low balance for a new, much more expensive one, inventory stays tight.
Meanwhile, the few properties that do come to market are priced to compensate the seller for giving up that low rate, low balance, low tax basis, etc.
They need motivation somehow and listing for a fire-sale price ain’t it.
As such, prospective buyers who are already stretched by high interest rates and prices either can’t afford it or choose to wait it out.
Sure, new construction helps to some degree, but it can’t fully offset this strange dynamic, nor are most new builds in areas where folks want to buy (think the outskirts).
Builders face their own challenges today with high costs and tight margins, and they haven’t forgotten the early 2000s housing bust.
So they’re rather smartly not flooding the market with for-sale inventory either.
The end result is sustained high home prices on a national level, even if some markets experience weakness, namely those with a higher concentration of more recent home buyers (those with less to lose by selling or foreclosing).
The irony is that the “right price” for sellers, which is most often a “high price,” keeps the housing market from cracking in a meaningful way.
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“I think actually admitting that there is no work-life balance is the first step to getting there in a way because it’s just not possible,” Johansson—best known for her role as Black Widow in the Marvel franchise—told CBS Sunday Morning.
The actress said there will almost always be a “deficit” somewhere, whether at work or at home—and over time, she’s learned to accept that not everything can be done perfectly.
“I’ve learned to be more kind to myself in that way. You can’t do all of these things all the time,” Johansson said. “There’s just like, ‘Is it good enough?’”
As Scarlett Johansson has taken on more roles in her life, including launching a skincare brand, raising two children (born in 2014 and 2021), and balancing a marriage—she said her definition of success has evolved. As a parent in particular, she said it means doing what’s right, even if it doesn’t always make her the “most popular.”
“Somebody once told me, ‘If you’re successful as a parent like 75% of the time, that’s good—if you’re doing 75% of it like right, then you’re winning, which is probably true,” Johansson said.
Johansson was the fourth-highest paid actor in 2025, behind Adam Sandler, Tom Cruise, and Mark Wahlberg, according to Forbes. Her net worth is about $165 million, estimates Celebrity Net Worth.
But growing up in Manhattan in a family of six, she has said money was often tight during her childhood. In a 2017 interview with Entertainment Tonight, she recalled her family relying on welfare and food stamps to get by.
By age nine, Johansson had already begun acting, landing her first role in the 1994 Rob Reiner-directed comedy, North. Her rise to stardom accelerated with films like Lost in Translation, Marriage Story, and a string of Marvel blockbusters culminating in the 2021 standalone film Black Widow.
Beyond acting, Johansson has also occasionally used her platform for public and political advocacy, including longstanding support for feminism and women’s rights, as well as canvassing against the reelection of President Donald Trump.
Her career has even pulled her into the center of debates around artificial intelligence. In 2024, Johansson publicly accused OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman of using a voice for the company’s chatbot that sounded strikingly similar to her own after she declined to participate in the project.
Johansson isn’t alone in questioning whether true work-life balance exists—even as it’s become a top motivator for job seekers. Many high achievers have echoed the same sentiment: succeeding at the highest level often comes with tradeoffs.
Emma Watson, best known for playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series, said the intense demands of filmmaking made balance feel nearly unattainable as she grew up in the spotlight.
“I just used to completely sacrifice myself for whatever the thing was I was trying to achieve,” Watson said on the On Purpose podcast last year.
“Making films, the hours on them are so demanding, that to have your own life alongside that, to have that balance is almost impossible.”
That same mentality extends beyond Hollywood. Emma Grede, the CEO of Good American and a founding partner of Skims, argued that extraordinary success inevitably requires extraordinary effort.
“If you are leading an extraordinary life, to think that extraordinary effort wouldn’t be coupled to that somehow is crazy,” Grede said on The Diary of a CEO podcast in 2025.
If it’s possible to have true work-life balance, she continued, “tell me who she is, and I’ll show you a liar.”
Even former President Barack Obama has admitted that having a balanced work and life will not always be possible.
Speaking on The Pivot Podcast last year, he said: “If you want to be excellent at anything—sports, music, business, politics—there’s going to be times of your life when you’re out of balance, where you’re just working and you’re single-minded.”
The best leaders are not necessarily more charismatic or authentic. They are more attuned to what employees need, and when.
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Borrowers searching online for “charities that pay off student loans” mostly find debt-relief operators charging fees, not nonprofits cutting checks. Real options exist, but they’re narrower (and slower) than most borrowers expect.
The most prominent debt-cancellation nonprofit, the Debt Collective, has used its Rolling Jubilee Fund to abolish more than $32 million in medical, student, payday, and probation debt over its history.
Notable student debt wins from the Debt Collective and Rolling Jubilee:
The Slowdown: Large-scale buy-and-cancel actions on student debt have stalled. The Debt Collective hasn’t announced a major student debt portfolio purchase in the last couple of years, shifting most of its energy into federal student loan forgiveness advocacy, organizing, and debt strikes.
There is no application portal where individual borrowers can request relief. Cancellation campaigns target institutional debt portfolios (usually tied to a specific school or debt type) not borrower-by-borrower aid.
Three real channels still move money against borrower balances:
Federal Forgiveness Programs
Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), Teacher Loan Forgiveness, Income-Driven Repayment forgiveness, Total and Permanent Disability discharge, and Borrower Defense remain the largest sources of cancelled student debt by dollar volume.
State Loan Repayment Assistance
State LRAPs target healthcare workers, teachers, lawyers in legal aid, and STEM roles in high-need areas. The National Health Service Corps and NURSE Corps are the largest federal-state hybrid programs.
Employer Student Loan Repayment Assistance
Employers can pay up to $5,250 per employee per year toward student loans on a tax-free basis. SECURE 2.0 also lets employers match an employee’s student loan payments with 401(k) contributions — meaning the employee gets retirement savings without diverting cash from their loan payment.
The College Investor maintains a running list of companies offering student loan repayment assistance, which is the most realistic “someone else helps pay my loans” path for the average borrower. Hundreds of employers (from Aetna and Fidelity to Google and Estée Lauder) offer some form of student loan repayment assistance today.
We’ve also covered nonprofit student loan forgiveness, which is forgiveness available through working at a 501(c)(3) — not charities writing off your balance.
If a website promises a charity will pay off your loans for an upfront fee, walk away. The CFPB and FTC have brought repeated enforcement actions against operators using “forgiveness charity” branding to collect fees and stop borrower payments.
The legitimate path remains employer benefits, federal and state programs, and (for a small share of borrowers) institutional debt cancellation campaigns that have largely gone quiet on student debt for now.
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Editor: Colin Graves
The post Are There Charities That Pay Off Student Loans? Here’s What’s Real In 2026 appeared first on The College Investor.
![[YMMV] PayPal Rewards: Use Pay Later For First Time & Get 15% Back (Up To $30 In Points, Select Merchants)](https://globalinvestmentstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/paypal-pay-later-1024x456-768x342.png "[YMMV] PayPal Rewards: Use Pay Later For First Time & Get 15% Back (Up To $30 In Points, Select Merchants)")
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Keep in mind PayPal is removing the redeem for cashback offer. Suspect most readers won’t be eligible due to doing better offers in the past. Best Buy really the only interesting merchant.
Hat tip to reader smiff
