artificial intelligence
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AI-focused music production, distribution and education platform LANDR has devised a new way for musicians to capitalize on the incoming AI age with consent and compensation in mind. With its new Fair Trade AI program, any musician who wishes to join can be part of this growing pool of songs that will be used to […]
Disney Music Group and AudioShake, an AI stem separation company, are teaming up. As part of their partnership, AudioShake will help Disney separate the individual instrument tracks (“stems”) for some of its classic back catalog and provide AI lyric transcription.
According to a press release, Disney says that it hopes this will “unlock new listening and fan engagement experiences” for the legendary catalog, which includes everything from the earliest recordings of Steamboat Willie (which is now in the public domain), to Cinderella, to The Lion King, to contemporary hits like High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
Given so many of Disney’s greatest hits were made decades ago with now-out-of-date recording technology, this new partnership will allow the company to use the music in new ways for the first time. Stem separation, for instance, can help with re-mixing and mastering old audio for classic Disney films. It could also allow Disney to isolate the vocals or the instrumentals on old hits.
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Disney’s partnership with AudioShake began when the tech start-up was selected for the 2024 Disney Accelerator, a business development program designed to accelerate the growth of new companies around the world. Other participants included AI voice company Eleven Labs and autonomous vehicle company Nuro.
At the accelerator’s Demo Day 2024, on May 23, AudioShake gave a hint at what could be to come in their partnership with Disney when AudioShake CEO, Jessica Powell, showed how stem separation could be used to fix muffled dialog and music in the opening scene of Peter Pan.
Disney explained at the Demo Day that many of their earlier recordings are missing their original stems and that has limited their ability to use older hits in sync licensing, remastering, and emerging formats like immersive audio and lyric videos.
“We were deeply impressed by AudioShake’s sound separation technology, and were among its early adopters,” says David Abdo, SVP and General Manager of Disney Music Group. “We’re excited to expand our existing stem separation work as well as integrate AudioShake’s lyric transcription system. AudioShake is a great example of cutting-edge technology that can benefit our artists and songwriters, and the team at AudioShake have been fantastic partners.”
“Stems and lyrics are crucial assets that labels and artists can use to open up recordings to new music experiences,” says Powell. “We’re thrilled to deepen our partnership with Disney Music Group, and honored to work with their extensive and iconic catalog.”
SEVENTEEN singer/producer WOOZI has responded to a British news feature claiming that the K-pop group is using artificial intelligence when recording its music. WOOZI, who also co-writes the group’s songs, reportedly had thoughts after a BBC News story posted last week claimed that SEVENTEEN’s most recent single, “Maestro,” was an example of the group’s dive […]
For a little over a year, since the Fake Drake track bum rushed the music business, executives have been debating whether generative artificial intelligence is a threat or an opportunity. The answer is both — creators are already using AI tools and they already compete with AI music. But the future will be shaped by the lawsuits the major labels filed two weeks ago against Suno and Udio for copyright infringement for allegedly using the labels’ music to train their AI programs.
Like most debates about technology, this one will be resolved in real time — Internet start-ups tend to believe that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission. Although neither Suno nor Udio has said that it trained its program on major label music, the label lawsuits point out that both companies have said that using copyrighted works in this manner would be “fair use,” a defense for otherwise infringing conduct. They’re not admitting they did it — just defending themselves in case they did.
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Whether this qualifies as fair use is well over a million-dollar question, since statutory damages can reach $150,000 per work infringed. The stakes are even higher than that, though. If ingesting copyrighted works on a mass scale to train an AI is allowed under fair use, the music business could have a hard time limiting, controlling, or making money on this technology.
If it’s not, the labels will gain at least some control over these companies, and perhaps the entire nascent sector. There are other ways to limit AI, from legislation to likeness rights, but only copyright law has the kind of statutory damages that offer real leverage.
Although neither Suno nor Udio has issued a legal response, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman released a statement that said the labels had “reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook.” The obvious reference is Napster, since most people believe that in the late ‘90s the music business saw the future and decided to sue it.
That’s not exactly what happened. The major labels knew that the future was digital — they lobbied for the 1995 Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act, which ensured that streaming services had to pay to play recordings in the U.S., even though traditional radio stations don’t. They just didn’t want peer-to-peer services to distribute their content for nothing — or to have to negotiate with them while they were doing so. In July 2000, three months after the major labels sued Napster, leading executives sat down with the company to try to figure out a deal, but they couldn’t agree; the labels negotiated as though Napster needed a license and Napster negotiated as though it didn’t. In the end, after a decade of lawsuits and lost business, creators and rightsholders established their right to be paid for online distribution and the music sector began recovering.
And here we are again: History isn’t repeating itself, but it seems to be rhyming. If the labels negotiated with Suno and Udio now, how much would those companies be willing to pay for rights they may or may not need? It’s easy to make fun of either side, but it’s hard to know how much to charge for rights, or pay for them, before you even know if you need them.
These lawsuits aren’t about whether creators and rightsholders should embrace or avoid AI — it’s coming, for good and ill. The question, in modern terminology, is whether the embrace will be consensual, and under what terms. Most creators and rightsholders want to do business with AI companies, as long as that actually means business — negotiating deals in something that resembles a free market.
What they’re afraid of is having technology companies build empires on their work without paying to use it — especially to create a product that creates music that will compete with them. That depends on the outcome of these lawsuits. Because if you don’t have the right to say no, you can’t really get to a fair yes.
A couple of weeks ago, at a culture conference organized by the German recorded music trade organization, I heard German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann put this as well as anyone I’ve ever heard. “The moment people have the opportunity to say ‘No’ and to enforce this ‘No,’ they gain a legal negotiating position,” he said in a speech. (Buschmann also makes electronic music, as it happens.) In the European Union, rightsholders can opt out of AI ingestion, which is far from ideal but better than nothing.
What happens in the U.S. — which often shapes the global media business — might hinge on the results of these lawsuits. There are two dozen copyright lawsuits about AI, but these look to be among the most important. Some of the others are mired in jurisdictional maneuvering, while others simply aren’t as strong: a lawsuit filed by The New York Times could involve a different fair use determination if the ingested articles are used as sources but not to generate new work. These cases are straightforward, but they won’t move fast: It’s easy to imagine the issue going to the Supreme Court.
Despite the high stakes — and what will almost certainly be a rap beef’s worth of sniping back and forth — determinations of fair use involve a considerable amount of nuance. Fair use makes it legal in some cases to excerpt or even use all of a copyrighted work without permission, usually for the purposes of commentary. (An iconic Supreme Court case involved 2 Live Crew’s parody of the Roy Orbison song “Oh, Pretty Woman.”) This is far from that, but Suno and Udio will presumably argue that their actions qualify as “transformative use” in the way the Google Books project did. Next week I’ll write about the arguments we can expect to hear, the decisions we could see, and what could happen while we wait for them.
Warner Music Group (WMG) sent letters to tech companies this week instructing them not to use the label’s music to train artificial intelligence technology without permission. Sony Music sent out similar letters to over 700 companies in May.
“It is imperative that all uses and implementations of machine learning and AI technologies respect the rights of all those involved in the creation, marketing, promotion, and distribution of music,” Warner’s notice reads.
It continues, “all parties must obtain an express license from WMG to use… any creative works owned or controlled by WMG or to link to or ingest such creative works in connection with the creation of datasets, as inputs for any machine learning or AI technologies, or to train or develop any machine learning or AI technologies.”
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The notices from Sony and Warner come in the wake of the AI Act, legislation that was passed in the European Union in May. “Any use of copyright protected content requires the authorization of the rightsholder concerned unless relevant copyright exceptions and limitations apply,” the act notes. “Rightsholders may choose to reserve their rights over their works or other subject matter to prevent text and data mining, unless this is done for the purposes of scientific research.”
If companies take this action, then “providers of general-purpose AI models need to obtain an authorization from rightsholders if they want to carry out text and data mining over such works.”
The Cold War between the music industry and much of the AI world has been heating up in recent months. Labels are adamant that AI companies should license their music if they want to use those massive catalogs of recordings to develop song generation technology.
Most AI companies, however, aren’t interested in paying. They often argue that their activities fall under “fair use” — the U.S. legal doctrine that allows for the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations.
In June, the three major labels sued two AI music companies, Suno and Udio, accusing them both of “willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.” “These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end,” RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said in a statement.
In a response to the suits, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said his company’s tech is “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content.” Udio said it “stand[s] behind our technology.”
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: Pharrell Williams and Louis Vuitton face a trademark lawsuit over “Pocket Socks”; Diplo is hit with a lawsuit claiming he distributed “revenge porn”; the Village People move forward with a lawsuit against Disney; a longtime attorney repping Britney Spears moves on; and much more.
Top stories this week…
SOCKED WITH A LAWSUIT – Pharrell Williams and Louis Vuitton were hit with a trademark lawsuit over their launch of a high-end line of “Pocket Socks” a literal sock-with-a-pocket that launched at Paris Fashion Week last year and sells for the whopping price of $530. The case was filed by a California company called Pocket Socks Inc. that says it’s been using that same name for more than a decade on a similar product. AI FIRMS FIRE BACK – Suno and Udio, the two AI music startups sued by the major record label last week over allegations that they had stolen copyrighted works on a mass scale to create their models, fired back with statements in their defense. Suno called its tech “transformative” and promised that it would only generate “completely new outputs”; Udio said it was “completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set.”REVENGE PORN CLAIMS – Diplo was sued by an unnamed former romantic partner who accused him of violating “revenge porn” laws by sharing sexually-explicit videos and images of her without permission. NYPD confirmed to Billboard that a criminal investigation into the alleged incident was also underway. DISCO v. DISNEY – A California judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Village People that claims the Walt Disney Co. has blackballed the legendary disco band from performing at Disney World. Disney had invoked California’s anti-SLAPP law and argued it had a free speech right to book whatever bands it chooses, but a judge ruled that the company had failed to show the issue was linked to the kind of “public conversation” that’s protected under the statute. WRIT ME BABY ONE MORE TIME – More than two years after Mathew Rosengart helped Britney Spears escape the longstanding legal conservatorship imposed by her father, the powerhouse litigator is no longer representing the pop star. In a statement, the Greenberg Traurig attorney said he was shifting to focusing on other clients: “It’s been an honor to serve as Britney’s litigator and primarily to work with her to achieve her goals.” PHONY FEES? – SiriusXM was hit with a class action lawsuit that claims the company has been earning billions in revenue by tacking a shady “U.S. Music Royalty Fee” onto consumers’ bills. The fee — allegedly 21.4% of the actual advertised price — represents a “deceptive pricing scheme whereby SiriusXM falsely advertises its music plans at lower prices than it actually charges,” the suit claims. DIVORCE DRAMA – Amid an increasingly ugly divorce case, Billy Ray Cyrus filed a new response claiming that he had been abused physically, verbally and emotionally by his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Firerose. The filing actually came in response to allegations that it was Cyrus who had subjected Firerose to “psychological abuse” during their short-lived marriage. UK ROYALTIES LAWSUIT – A group of British musicians filed a joint lawsuit against U.K. collecting society PRS, accusing the organization of a “lack of transparency” and “unreasonable” terms in how it licenses and administers live performance rights. The case, filed at London’s High Court, was brought by King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, as well as rock band The Jesus and Mary Chain and numerous other artists.
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On Monday (June 24), the three major music companies filed lawsuits against artificial intelligence (AI) music startups Suno and Udio, alleging the widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale.” Spearheaded by the RIAA, the two similar lawsuits arrived four days after Billboard first reported that the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two startups.
Filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.”
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Hours later, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman responded to the lawsuit with a statement sent to Billboard. “Suno’s mission is to make it possible for everyone to make music,” he said. “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. That is why we don’t allow user prompts that reference specific artists. We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook. Suno is built for new music, new uses, and new musicians. We prize originality.”
An RIAA spokesperson fired back at Shulman’s comment, saying: “Suno continues to dodge the basic question: what sound recordings have they illegally copied? In an apparent attempt to deceive working artists, rightsholders, and the media about its technology, Suno refuses to address the fact that its service has literally been caught on tape — as part of the evidence in this case — doing what Mr. Shulman says his company doesn’t do: memorizing and regurgitating the art made by humans. Winners of the streaming era worked cooperatively with artists and rightsholders to properly license music. The losers did exactly what Suno and Udio are doing now.”
Udio responded on Tuesday (June 25) with a lengthy statement posted to the company’s website. You can read it in full below.
In the past two years, AI has become a powerful tool for creative expression across many media – from text to images to film, and now music. At Udio, our mission is to empower artists of all kinds to create extraordinary music. In our young life as a company, we have sat in the studios of some of the world’s greatest musicians, workshopped lyrics with up-and-coming songwriters, and watched as millions of users created extraordinary new music, ranging from the funny to the profound.
We have heard from a talented musician who, after losing the ability to use his hands, is now making music again. Producers have sampled AI-generated tracks to create hit songs, like ‘BBL Drizzy’, and everyday music-lovers have used the technology to express the gamut of human emotions from love to sorrow to joy. Groundbreaking technologies entail change and uncertainty. Let us offer some insight into how our technology works.
Generative AI models, including our music model, learn from examples. Just as students listen to music and study scores, our model has “listened” to and learned from a large collection of recorded music.
The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas — the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no one. Our system is explicitly designed to create music reflecting new musical ideas. We are completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set, and in fact, have implemented and continue to refine state-of-the-art filters to ensure our model does not reproduce copyrighted works or artists’ voices.
We stand behind our technology and believe that generative AI will become a mainstay of modern society.
Virtually every new technological development in music has initially been greeted with apprehension, but has ultimately proven to be a boon for artists, record companies, music publishers, technologists, and the public at large. Synthesizers, drum machines, digital recording technology, and the sound recording itself are all examples of once-controversial music creation tools that were feared in their early days. Yet each of these innovations ultimately expanded music as an art and as a business, leading to entirely new genres of music and billions of dollars in the pockets of artists, songwriters and the record labels and music publishers who profit from their creations.
We know that many musicians — especially the next generation — are eager to use AI in their creative workflows. In the near future, artists will compose music alongside their fans, amateur musicians will create entirely new musical genres, and talented creators — regardless of means — will be able to scale the heights of the music industry.
The future of music will see more creative expression than ever before. Let us use this watershed moment in technology to expand the circle of creators, empower artists, and celebrate human creativity.
AI has incredible promise and music creators are first in line exploring just how far these tools and innovations can take us.
At the same time, like every new technology, AI has risks and music creators are also first in line working to ensure it develops in lawful, responsible ways that respect individual autonomy and extend human creativity and possibility.
Yet today, a year and a half after the first mass market AI services were released, we still don’t know whether the promise or the peril of AI will win out.
Too many developers and investors seem to see a zero sum game – where AI behemoths scrape artists’ and songwriters’ life’s work off the internet for free and without any opportunity for individual choice, autonomy, or values. Where most of us see music, art, and culture to be cherished, they see soulless data to copied, “tokenized,” and exploited. Where most of us look to collaborate and reach for new horizons, they prefer to exploit art and culture for their own narrow gains. On the road to society’s AI future, it’s their way or no way.
At the top of the list of irresponsible developers are two music generation services, Suno and Udio, who claim to offer the ability to generate “new” music based on simple text prompts – a feat that’s only possible because these models have copied and exploited human-created music on a mass scale without authorization. Both have clearly chosen the low road of secretive, unconsented scraping and exploitation of copyrighted creative works instead of the high road of licensing and partnership.
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To address this egregious conduct, a group of music companies have today filed lawsuits against Suno and Udio in federal court in Boston and New York City, respectively. These lawsuits seek to stop the companies’ industrial scale infringement and steer generative AI back onto a healthy, responsible, lawful path.
Suno and Udio clearly recognize the business risks they are taking, going to extreme lengths to avoid transparency and refusing to disclose even the most obvious facts about how they have exploited copyrighted works or to even show us what works they have copied and used. If they really believed their own “fair use” rhetoric, if they really believe what they are doing is legal, would they work so hard to hide the ball?
The worst part is, these are multi-million dollar companies funded by the deepest pockets in the world who know the long term value music brings to their projects and who can well afford to pay fair rates for it; they just don’t want to. They willingly invest mass sums in compute and engineering, but want to take the most important ingredient – high quality human creativity – for free.
It’s a deeply shortsighted gamble – and one that has a track record of failing to deliver. Early internet services who relied on similar arguments and failed to get permission before launching are the ones who flamed out most spectacularly. Meanwhile digital streamers that partnered with artists and rightsholders to gain permission and innovate a healthy, sustainable marketplace together are today’s leading global music services.
And it’s totally unnecessary. Music creators are reaching out and leaning into opportunities in AI that support both innovation and the rights of artists and songwriters and have extended the hand of partnership and licensing to responsible AI companies.
In the last year, Sony, Warner and Universal have used creative AI tools to deliver breathtaking new moments with iconic artists including The Beatles, Roberta Flack, and David Gilmour and the Orb, all with appropriate partnership and consent. Music companies have partnered with ethical cutting-edge AI firms like BandLab, Endel and SoundLabs. And singer/songwriter Randy Travis used AI to record his first new song since largely losing his voice after a 2013 stroke.
But AI platforms should not mistake the music community’s embrace of AI as a willingness to accept continuing mass infringement. While free-market partnerships are the best path forward, we will not allow the status quo scraping and copying of artists’ creative legacies without permission to stand unchallenged. As in the past, music creators will enforce their rights to protect the creative engine of human artistry and enable the development of a healthy and sustainable licensed market that recognizes the value of both creativity and technology.
Generative AI has extraordinary promise. But realizing it will take collaboration, partnership, and genuine respect for human creativity. It’s time for AI companies to choose – go nowhere alone or explore a rich, amazing future together.
Mitch Glazier is Chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
The three major music companies filed lawsuits against AI music companies Suno and Udio on Monday, alleging the widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale.” The lawsuits, spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), arrive four days after Billboard first reported the news the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two start-ups.
Filed by plaintiffs that include Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.”
“Building and operating [these services] requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to ‘train’ a software ‘model’ to generate outputs,” the lawyers for the major labels explain. “For [these services], this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.”
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“Since the day it launched, Udio has flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service,” the lawsuit against Udio reads. “Neither Udio, nor any other generative AI company, can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners.”
The lawsuit is seeking both an injunction to bar the companies from continuing to train on the copyrighted songs, as well as damages from the infringements that have already taken place. Neither Suno nor Udio immediately returned requests for comment on Monday.
Suno and Udio have quickly become two of the most advanced and important players in the emerging field of generative AI music. While many competitors only create instrumentals or lyrics or vocals, Suno and Udio can generate all three in the click of a button with shocking precision. Udio has already produced what could be considered the first AI-generated hit song with the Drake diss track “BBL Drizzy,” which was generated on the platform by comedian King Willonius and popularized by a Metro Boomin remix. Suno has also achieved early success since its December 2023 launch, raising $125 million in funding from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Both companies have declined to comment on whether or not unlicensed copyrights were part of their datasets. In a previous interview with Billboard, Udio co-founder David Ding said simply that the company trained on “good music.” However, in a series of articles for Music Business Worldwide, founder of AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, found that he was able to generate music from Suno and Udio that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted music. This is true across melody, chords, style and lyrics,” he wrote.
The complaints against the two companies also make the case that copyrighted material was used to train these models. Some of the circumstantial evidence cited in the lawsuits include generated songs by Suno and Udio that sound just like the voices of Bruce Springsteen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Jackson and ABBA; outputs that parrot the producer tags of Cash Money AP and Jason Derulo; and outputs that sound nearly identical to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” The Temptations’ “My Girl,” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and more.
In a recent Rolling Stone profile of Suno, investor Antonio Rodriguez admitted that the start-up does not have licenses for whatever music it has trained on but added that it was not a concern to him. Knowing that labels and publishers could sue was just “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company, because we’re the fat wallet that will get sued right behind these guys… Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.”
Many AI companies argue that training is protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine — an important rule that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law. Though fair use has historically allowed for things like news reporting and parody, AI firms say it applies equally to the “intermediate” use of millions of works to build a machine that spits out entirely new creations.
Anticipating that defense from Suno and Udio, the lawyers for the major labels argue that “[Suno and Udio] cannot avoid liability for [their] willful copyright infringement by claiming fair use. The doctrine of fair use promotes human expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circumstances, but [the services] offe[r] imitative machine-generated music—not human creativity or expression.”
News of the complaints filed against Suno and Udio follow up a previous lawsuit that also concerned the use of copyrighted materials to train models without a license. Filed by UMG, Concord and ABKCO in October against Anthropic, a major AI company, that case focused more specifically on copied lyrics.
In a statement about the lawsuits, RIAA CEO and chairman Mitch Glazier says, “The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge. But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow adds, “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing. These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”
A few weeks back, a member of the team at my company, Ircam Amplify, joined one of the multiple AI music generators available online and input a brief prompt for a song. Within minutes, a new track was generated and promptly uploaded to a distribution platform. In just a couple of hours, that song, in which no human creativity played a part, was available on various streaming platforms. We diligently took action to remove the track from all of them, but the experiment highlighted a significant point.
It is now that simple! My aim here is not to pass judgment on whether AI-generated music is a good or a bad thing — from that perspective, we are neutral — but we think it is important to emphasize that, while the process is easy and cost-effective, there are absolutely no safeguards currently in place to ensure that consumers know if the music they are listening to is AI-generated. Consequently, they cannot make an informed choice about whether they want to listen to such music.
With AI-generated songs inundating digital platforms, streaming services require vast technological resources to manage the volume of tracks, diverting attention away from the promotion of music created by “human” artists and diluting the royalty pool.
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Like it or not, AI is here to stay, and more and more songs will find their way onto streaming platforms given how quick and easy the process is. We already know that there are AI-generated music “farms” flooding streaming platforms; over 25 million tracks were recently removed by Deezer, and it is reasonable to speculate that a significant proportion of these were AI-generated.
In the interest of transparency, consumers surely deserve to know whether the music they are tuning into is the genuine product of human creativity or derived from computer algorithms. But how can AI-generated tracks be easily distinguished? Solutions already exist. At Ircam Amplify, we offer a series of audio tools, from spatial sound to vocal separator, that cover the full audio supply chain. One of the latest technologies we have launched is an AI-generated detector designed to help rights holders, as well as platforms, identify tracks that are AI-generated. Through a series of benchmarks, we have been able to determine the “fingerprints” of AI models and apply them to their output to identify tracks coming from AI-music factories.
The purpose of any solution should be to support the whole music ecosystem by providing a technical answer to a real problem while contributing to a more fluid and transparent digital music market.
Discussions around transparency and AI are gaining traction all around the world. From Tokyo to Washington, D.C., from Brussels to London, policymakers are considering new legislation that would require platforms to identify AI-generated content. That is the second recommendation in the recent report “Artificial Intelligence and the Music Industry — Master or Servant?” published by the UK Parliament.
Consumers are also demanding it. A recent UK Music survey of more than 2,000 people, commissioned by Whitestone Insight, emphatically revealed that more than four out of five people (83%) agree that if AI technology has been used to create a song, it should be distinctly labeled as such.
Similarly, a survey conducted by Goldmedia in 2023 on behalf of rights societies GEMA and SACEM found that 89% of the collective management organizations’ members expressed a desire for AI-generated music tracks and other works to be clearly identified.
These overwhelming numbers tell us that concerns about AI are prevalent within creative circles and are also shared by consumers. There are multiple calls for the ethical use of AI, mostly originating from rights holders — artists, record labels, music publishers, collective management organizations, etc. — and transparency is usually at the core of these initiatives.
Simply put, if there’s AI in the recipe, then it should be flagged. If we can collectively find a way to ensure that AI-generated music is identified, then we will have made serious progress towards transparency.
Nathalie Birocheau currently serves as CEO at Ircam Amplify and is also a certified engineer (Centrale-Supélec) and former strategy consultant who has led several major cultural and media projects, notably within la Maison de la Radio. She became Deputy Director of France Info in 2016, where she led the creation of the global media franceinfo.