artificial intelligence
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YouTube recently launched an AI Music incubator with artists and producers from Universal Music Group. The purpose of the group, according to Universal CEO Lucian Grainge, is to explore, experiment, and offer feedback on the AI-related musician tools and products the Google team is researching — with the hope that more artists will benefit from YouTube’s creative suite.
This partnership demonstrates the clear desire to involve the industry in the development stages of AI products and protect the human component of artistry. This desire is heightened in the face of deep fakes. Just last month, Google launched its Synth ID watermark meant to spot AI-generated images (Google DeepMind CEO Denis Hassabis cited the importance of deepfake detection ahead of a contentious election season). “Heart on My Sleeve,” the song created with AI-generated voices of fake Drake and The Weeknd kicked off the music industry’s scramble to shut down and stamp out any unauthorized use of artists’ voices. Most importantly, though, the viral track proved that AI voice models are here and only improving with each passing day.
As artists, labels, and other rights holders have grown more concerned about AI models learning and profiting from their copyrighted material, fans and creators have discovered new ways to engage with their favorite artists and imagine completely new musical works using their AI voice models. This is prompting other industry executives (myself included) to wonder how these models can continue to be used to explore this new creative frontier of music while protecting artists.
With all of this in mind, the industry needs to mull over a few philosophical questions and consider the distinction between voice cloning and voice synthesis. A singer is much more than timbre, the primary quality that voice models modify in a voice. AI voices are not the same as samples, where the whole vocal element is based on an underlying artist’s full performance which would include pitch, emotion, timbre, accent, tone, etc.
Regardless, AI innovations will only reach their maximum potential if the industry faces one foundational issue: artists and their labels need to control the ways in which their image, likeness and voice are used. Whether the industry decides to embrace these innovations or limit AI-powered cloning entirely, the next step begins with synthetic voice detection. Is the artist singing on any given track fake or the real deal?
In the early 2000s, music companies found themselves losing control of their content to the digitalization of music. The industry’s initial impulse to crush file-sharing networks like Napster led to the launch of Apple’s iTunes store in 2003 and, eventually, legal streaming. Other digital rights management tools, like ContentID on YouTube, were developed to detect unauthorized use of music. Once the industry learned to embrace digital music and formed a foundational infrastructure to support it, streaming revenues soared — breaking the $10 billion mark for the first time in 2022 and making up 84% of the industry’s total revenue, according to the RIAA.
The industry needs synthetic voice detection, but with 120,000 new tracks uploaded to streaming platforms daily (according to Luminate) on top of the already existing back catalogs, can it be done accurately and at scale? The short answer: yes.
As the industry begins to embrace the responsible use of AI for synthetic voice creation, I strongly believe there should be a corresponding willingness for artists and labels to collaborate in that training process. It’s in their best interests to do this now. AI applications are already scaling in a variety of categories. Well-engineered models are becoming exponentially more efficient and can increasingly manage massive computing tasks. Combined with strategic operational approaches, this is achievable today.
To honor each artist’s decision whether or not to participate in voice models, the industry needs an easy and accessible way for artists to build their own voice models and grant fans and creators permission to use it. This type of initiative paired with synthetic voice detection ensures that only the voices and works of those who want to be involved in voice cloning and other derivative AI tools are used. Artists who want to create their own voice models can work with voice synthesis platforms to establish the terms of where and how their voice model can be used–offering more control and even opportunities for monetization.
Geraldo Ramos is the co-founder and CEO of Moises, the AI-driven music platform that is transforming the way artists and businesses incorporate AI technology into their workflows.
Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl has a message for a music industry facing disruption from artificial intelligence that’s often likened to the rise of file-sharing a quarter century ago: “You have to embrace technology, because it’s not like you can put technology in a bottle,” he said during an onstage interview at the Code […]
Lyor Cohen discussed “a future where generative AI has a profound impact on music” at the annual Made on YouTube event on Thursday (Sept. 21). YouTube’s longtime global head of music is nothing if not enthusiastic about artificial intelligence and its potential ability to supercharge music-making. Cohen told the attendees that “AI tools are opening up a new playground for creativity;” AI “can be used by artists to amplify and accelerate their creativity;” and AI can usher in “a new era of musical creativity.”
Cohen was joined by Charlie Puth, who played some piano and showed off his beatboxing, and Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl. Kyncl acknowledged that not everyone in music is as excited about AI as Cohen seems to be: “Change is unsettling; we are in that period of change.” He proposed charting a path forward where AI enthusiasts can gain from the technology while artists who are wary of it are somehow shielded from its impacts.
Artists “will create and they will use all kinds of tools to create… that’s their job,” Kyncl said. “It’s our job, the platforms and the music industry, to make sure that artists like Charlie who lean in [to AI] benefit. It’s also our job together to make sure that artists who don’t want to lean in are protected.” He pointed to the success of YouTube’s Content ID system, which helps the platform track user-generated content, as a potential model, because creators can choose to monetize that UGC or block it depending on their preferences.
YouTube previously signaled its interest in being part of music’s AI-driven future in August when it announced an “AI Music Incubator” that will include input from Anitta, Juanes, Ryan Tedder, Rodney Jerkins, and many others.
“This group will explore, experiment and offer feedback on the AI-related musical tools and products they are researching,” Universal CEO Lucian Grainge wrote in a blog post. “Once these tools are launched, the hope is that more artists who want to participate will benefit from and enjoy this creative suite.”
At the Made on YouTube event, CEO Neal Mohan also discussed a suite of new tools for creators that aim to put “the creative power of AI into the hands of billions of people.” These include Dream Screen, which “lets you create AI-generated video or image backgrounds for Shorts by typing in an idea,” and a search function that “will act like a music concierge” when it comes time to find a track to place into a video. “Our creator can just describe her video, and if she wants she can even include information about the length or type of song she’s looking for, and Creator Music suggests the right track at the right price,” Mohan explained.
Jade Beason, a YouTube creator, told the crowd she “spend[s] a lot of time trying to find the right music for videos” and is sometimes “guilty of actually just using the same song [over again] because I just can’t find the right one.” “Music has the ability to change how your audience actually feels when they’re watching your content,” she continued. “It’s the difference between someone seeing a video of yours and laughing or crying… so the idea that we can do this easily amongst everything else is actually quite wild.”
The significance of Washington washed over me as my flight dodged the historic monuments and we descended into DCA. An interesting metaphor for the opportunities and challenges of advocating for music creators’ rights in today’s lightning round race into the future.
I have visited many times over the years to fight for the rights of songwriters on Capitol Hill. This week, songwriter members of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) will once again be with me in Washington for “We Write the Songs,” a performance held at the Library of Congress and co-presented by The ASCAP Foundation. Hit songwriters will play for Members of Congress and others and share the stories behind their beloved songs. As songwriters, we are also here to affirm our rights as artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies seek to use our creations.
ASCAP is a unique entity in the music world — we are the only performance-rights organization (PRO) founded and governed by democratically elected music creators and publishers. As a membership organization, we represent nearly a million songwriters, composers, lyricists and music publishers across every genre. We are also the only U.S. PRO that operates on a not-for-profit basis so, unlike others whose profits may go elsewhere to corporate dividends and private equity investors, we put creators first in everything we do.
As the chairman of ASCAP’s board, I have seen our industry go through immense changes. When music moved from records to tapes to CDs to pirated online listening, our members descended upon Washington to ensure the rights of songwriters were respected across new platforms and listening experiences.
Emerging technologies – whether it be streaming or AI – have always presented our industry both challenges and opportunities. But in every instance, we as songwriters are often the first to feel the effects when technology outpaces the law.
During Songwriter Advocacy Day, held the day after We Write the Songs, ASCAP members – the songwriters, composers and publishers that form the soundtrack to our lives – will meet with Members of Congress and urge them to protect creators in the age of AI.
At ASCAP, we have developed six guiding principles for AI and we need Congress to act to uphold them:
Human Creators First, prioritizing rights and compensation for human creativity
Transparency, in identifying AI vs. human-generated works and retaining metadata
Consent, protecting the right for creators to decide whether their work is included in an AI training license
Compensation, making sure creators are paid fairly when their work is used in ANY way by AI, which is best accomplished in a free market, NOT with government-mandated licensing that essentially eliminates consent
Credit, when creators’ works are used in new AI-generated music
Global Consistency, an even playing field that values intellectual property across the global music and data ecosystem
While most songwriters work behind the scenes, our work has enormous value to an industry that generates $170 billion a year for the U.S. economy. But we have long been over-regulated — we are some of the most heavily controlled small business owners in the country. Roughly three-quarters of the average American songwriter’s income is subject to federal government regulations. All the while, big media and tech companies are consistently looking for ways to pay songwriters less by regulating us even more.
ASCAP has embraced new and emerging advances in technology, and we have the capacity and infrastructure to manage it at scale. But it has remained painfully clear that any new technology needs to respect existing copyright law. Music creators are concerned about the threat to their livelihood and 8 out of 10 believe A.I. companies need better regulation. Our mission at ASCAP is to help music creators navigate the future while protecting their rights and livelihoods, and enabling the type of innovation that will move the entire music industry forward.
Just because AI requires a high volume of inputs, that does not mean it cannot be licensed or deserves an exception under the law. Just as we’ve approached the streaming market, we believe the opportunities presented by AI can be realized in the free market. To do so, we need lawmakers to stand with songwriters and not give big tech and AI companies a free ride with government-mandated licenses for AI.
AI is a new challenge, but we are well positioned to meet this challenge as we always have in the face of new technologies. We are ready to help chart the path, and we look forward to sharing those insights — and breaking it down on the dance floor — with the same lawmakers whose partnership and enthusiasm has helped us to fight for the rights of songwriters as new technologies emerge.
ASCAP president and chairman of the board Paul Williams is an Oscar-, Grammy- and Golden Globe-winning composer and lyricist who has written “The Rainbow Connection,” “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and many other hits.
TikTok announced new tools to help creators label content that was generated by artificial intelligence. In addition, the company said on Tuesday (Sept. 19) that it plans to “start testing ways to label AI-generated content automatically.”
“AI enables incredible creative opportunities, but can potentially confuse or mislead viewers if they’re not aware content was generated or edited with AI,” the company wrote. “Labeling content helps address this, by making clear to viewers when content is significantly altered or modified by AI technology.”
As AI technology has become better — at generating credible-looking images or mimicking pop stars’ voices, for example — and more popular, regulators have expressed increasing concern about the technology’s potential for mis-use.
In July, President Biden’s administration announced that seven leading AI companies made voluntary commitments “to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology.” One key point: “The companies commit to developing robust technical mechanisms to ensure that users know when content is AI generated, such as a watermarking system. This action enables creativity with AI to flourish but reduces the dangers of fraud and deception.”
Voluntary commitments are, of course, voluntary, which is likely why TikTok also announced that it will “begin testing an ‘AI-generated’ label that we eventually plan to apply automatically to content that we detect was edited or created with AI.” Tools to determine whether an image has been crafted by AI already exist, and some are better than others. In June, The New York Times tested five programs, finding that the “services are advancing rapidly, but at times fall short.”
The challenge is that as detection technology improves, so does the tech for evading detection. Cynthia Rudin, a computer science and engineering professor at Duke University, told the paper that “every time somebody builds a better generator, people build better discriminators, and then people use the better discriminator to build a better generator. The generators are designed to be able to fool a detector.”
Similar detection efforts are being discussed in the music industry as it debates how to weigh AI-generated songs relative to tracks that incorporate human input.
“You have technologies out there in the market today that can detect an AI-generated track with 99.9% accuracy, versus a human-created track,” Believe co-founder and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie said in April. “We need to finalize the testing, we need to deploy,” he added, “but these technologies exist.”
The streaming service Deezer laid out its own plan to “develop tools to detect AI-generated content” in June. “From an economic point of view, what matters most is [regulating] the things that really go viral, and usually those are the AI-generated songs that use fake voices or copied voices without approval,” Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira told Billboard this summer.
Moises, another AI-technology company, dove into the fray as well, announcing its own set of new tools on Aug. 1. “There’s definitely a lot of chatter” about this, Matt Henninger, Moises’ vp of sales and business development told Billboard. “There’s a lot of testing of different products.”
Independent musicians will have more power to negotiate with artificial intelligence developers over “fairer rates and terms for the use of their music” if a newly introduced version of the Protect Working Musicians Act passes the U.S. House, according to Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.).
“AI threatens the creator — finding the person or entity that has co-opted your work and turned it into something else and then going after them is so onerous,” Ross, who sponsored the revised act and sits on the House Judiciary Committee, says in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “That’s one of the reasons for this bill — to allow people to do this collaboratively. We need to do this sooner than later. We’re seeing this threat every single day.”
The Protect Working Musicians Act, which Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) introduced in October 2021 a few months before he left Congress, would allow indie artists to collectively bargain for royalty rates with streaming giants such as Spotify and Apple Music. As it stands, the major labels that own most worldwide master recordings have enormous negotiating power to set rates; the act would “give the smaller independent more of a voice,” says Jen Jacobsen, executive director of the Artist Rights Alliance, which worked with Ross on revising the bill.
Ross picked up the bill when Deutch announced he would not return to the House, then held hearings with indie artists in her district, which includes Raleigh. Since then, Ross says, “The AI issue has become even more important.” The revised act would allow artists to behave like plaintiffs in a class-action suit, she adds, “fighting for their rights” with a central attorney.
“Our work is being scraped and ingested and exploited without us even knowing,” Jacobsen says. “Adding the AI platforms seemed like a relevant and important thing to do.”
Writers and artists have warned for months that AI could transform their ideas into new works with no way to get paid for the usage. In April, “Heart On My Sleeve,” an AI-created song that mimics the voices of Drake and The Weeknd, landed millions of TikTok, Spotify and YouTube plays. At the time, Sting told the BBC: “The building blocks of music belong to us, to human beings. That’s going to be a battle we all have to fight in a couple of years: defending our human capital against AI.”
“Musicians are really worried about this — not just the big-name ones, but small artists, too. Small ones, especially,” Jorgensen says. “The most important thing for this bill is that small, independent artists and record labels need to be recognized and have each others’ backs.”
It’s unclear when the House might vote on the revised bill — or if it would pass. “As you can see in Congress, lots of bills aren’t passing — like the budget!” Ross says. “But this has been a very bipartisan issue in the judiciary committee. It’s the perfect time to bring these issues up.”
Stability AI, one of the world’s most prominent generative AI companies, has joined the likes of Google, Meta and Open AI in creating a model that generates clips of music and sound. Called “Stable Audio,” the new text-to-music generator was trained on sounds from the music library Audio Sparx.
Stability touts its new product as the first music generation product that creates high-quality, 44.1 kHz music for commercial use though a process called “latent diffusion” — a process that was first introduced for images through Stable Diffusion, the company’s marquee product. Stable Audio uses sound conditioned on text metadata as well as audio file duration and start time to allow for greater control over the content of the generated audio.
By typing prompts like “post-rock, guitars, drum kit, bass, strings, euphoric, up-lifting, moody, flowing, raw, epic, sentimental, 125 BPM,” users can create up-to 20 seconds of sound through its free tier, or up-to 90 seconds of sound via its pro subscription.
In its announcement, the company touts Stable Audio as a tool for musicians “seeking to create samples to use in their own music.” The music generated could also be used to soundtrack advertisements and creator content, among other commercial applications.
“As the only independent, open and multimodal generative AI company, we are thrilled to use our expertise to develop a product in support of music creators,” says Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI. “Our hope is that Stable Audio will empower music enthusiasts and creative professionals to generate new content with the help of AI, and we look forward to the endless innovations it will inspire.”
This is not the AI giant’s first foray into audio and music AI. The company already has an open-source generative audio label, HarmonAI, which is designed to create accessible and playful music production tools “by musicians for musicians.” Parts of the HarmonAI team, including Ed Newton Rex, its vp of product, took part in the designing of Stable Audio.
Urgent action is needed to protect the United Kingdom’s longstanding success as one of the world’s biggest exporters of music, warns a new report from umbrella trade organization UK Music.
In particular, robust copyright laws must be put in place to ensure that creators and rights holders are shielded from the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI), says the trade body’s “Manifesto for Music,” published Tuesday (Sept. 12), which calls for increased government support to grow the sector.
In 2021, U.K. music exports totaled £2.5 billion ($3.1 billion) — up 10% on the previous year, but still lower than 2019’s pre-pandemic figures — according to data from UK Music. Those export totals are made up of record sales, publishing revenue, overseas touring by British acts and tourism spending by international tourists attending live shows in the United Kingdom.
When it comes to recorded music, hit albums by Harry Styles, Glass Animals and Ed Sheeran helped British music exports climb to a record high of £709 million ($910 million) last year, maintaining the country’s long-held position as the second largest exporter of music globally after the United States, according to labels trade body BPI.
Overall, the United Kingdom is the world’s third biggest recorded music market, as per IFPI rankings, behind the United States and Japan.
However, the growth of streaming in emerging territories such as Latin America, the Middle East and South Korea has eaten into the United Kingdom’s share of the global music market, which has fallen from a peak of 17% in 2015 to 12% in 2022. To arrest that decline, UK Music has published a five-point plan to boost exports, protect venues and studios, and promote diversity.
Among the trade group’s recommendations is the enforcement of strong copyright protections against generative AI systems, including clear labeling and a requirement for AI developers to keep and disclose records of any music works used for training purposes.
UK Music is additionally asking policymakers to introduce specific personality and image rights into the British legal framework — and ensure that AI-generated music is clearly distinguishable from human-created works.
Last month, a U.K. Parliament committee issued its own report on regulating the use of AI technology in the music and creative industries. One of the committee’s key recommendations was for the British government to commit to abandoning plans for a proposed (and since shelved) new text and data mining (TDM) exception that would allow AI companies to freely use copyright-protected works for commercial purposes.
“It’s critical that we ensure AI enables and supports human artistry and creativity, and does not damage it,” said UK Music interim chief executive Tom Kiehl, echoing the committee’s request to rule out any new TDM exceptions.
“Strong copyright and intellectual property protections must be at the center of any approach when it comes to AI,” said Kiehl.
Other recommendations in UK Music’s manifesto include the introduction of a new tax credit — similar to what’s in place in other European markets and some U.S. states — encouraging new music production in the country.
The trade group, which recently saw chief executive Jamie Njoku-Goodwin exit the London-based organization to work for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is also calling for increased investment in music education and for the government to secure a post-Brexit cultural touring agreement with the European Union that would reduce costs for U.K. acts touring Europe.
“Without action, the U.K. risks being overtaken by countries who are more proactive and ambitious in promoting their music sectors,” said Kiehl.
The United Kingdom’s moves to police the rapidly evolving AI sector come as other countries and jurisdictions, including the United States, China and the European Union, explore their own paths toward regulating the nascent technology.
Global organization of music publishers the International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) has partnered with piracy tracking company MUSO on a new ICMP Anti-Piracy Platform (APP) that aims to combat unlawful uses of member companies’ musical works. ICMP’s membership of major and independent music companies spans the globe, encompassing 76 national trade associations on six […]
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