A month ago, the Italian AI Music Awards were a name, a colour palette and a long list of ideas. Today there is a bilingual website, a growing Artists page, an Open Call that receives new tracks every day and a set of rules that has already been tested by real questions from real artists. This is what happened in between.
Human × AI, applied to ourselves
It would have been strange to launch an award about music made with AI without using AI to build it. The website was built with an AI-powered development tool, and AI helped us draft code, test layouts and translate pages between English and Italian. Every decision stayed human: the rules, the selection of the invited artists, the design choices, the texts you read and the many times we said "no, not like this" and started again. If we had to fill in our own Human × AI declaration, it would look a lot like the ones our artists send us.
The rules got sharper
The first version of the rules lasted exactly as long as it took for the first questions to arrive. Two changes came directly from you. Eligibility now covers Italian citizens, wherever they live, and anyone resident in Italy: an Italian artist in London or Berlin belongs to this scene as much as one in Milan. And the limit is now one track per person, not per artist, because many creators run more than one AI project at the same time. A rule that is easy to read is also a rule that is easy to respect.
We'd rather change a rule in the first month than defend an unclear one for a whole edition.
IAIMA TEAM
What you're sending us
Every new submission lands in our inbox within seconds, and we listen to all of them. Pop, rock, metal, indie, songs in Italian and in English: the variety is already wider than we expected. The Artists page now hosts 28 artist pages, each with an interview, a player and a pin on our map of Italy.
The Human × AI section on the home page turns the artists' declarations into numbers. In early November, lyrics were mostly written by people, while vocals were mostly generated with AI, with arrangement close behind. Across all six roles, the split was 38% human and 62% AI. Those numbers will keep moving as new artists join, and that's exactly the point: nobody had measured this scene before.
The part nobody sees
Not everything was music. For a few days, artist photos loaded slowly or disappeared on refresh. We ran a full audit, found the cause and moved the images to faster storage: today the same photo loads three to ten times faster. We fixed cropped covers, added automatic confirmation emails for every submission, cleaned up an outdated email address in our policies, and asked Google to index the site, which takes longer than anyone would like. None of this makes headlines, but it's what makes an award feel reliable.
The people around us
The 32 By Invitation artists answered our interviews with more openness than we hoped, and their pages are the heart of the site. We sent our first press release to Italian music and tech media, and the first replies are coming in. And two media partners joined us: NewsField, for news and current affairs, and MusicTodai, a blog entirely dedicated to AI music.
What comes next
Selection is progressive, so the first Open Call tracks will appear on the Artists page in the coming weeks. We're also strengthening the checks that protect the one-track-per-person rule, so that every entry competes on equal terms. The Open Call stays open until 31 January 2027, then the jury will choose the 8 finalists who join the By Invitation artists at the Online Final, whose date will be announced soon.
