Variety’s Michael Buckner
According to a recent report in the Financial Times, the world’s largest music company, Universal Music Group, has announced that the artificial intelligence company will use its own music to power major streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. I’m asking you to block me from “training”.
A UMG spokesperson confirmed the report and told the FT: Our platform his partners will want to prevent their services from being used in a way that harms artists. ”
The process involves AI companies uploading copyrighted music from their platforms into their technology, allowing bots to digest the lyrics and music, essentially creating songs and melodies in those styles. . Among the myriad of recent examples, David Guetta recently used ChatGPT to add an AI-generated Eminem rap to one of his songs, but he declined to release the song. You seem to have circumvented the rights issue. The real Eminem is a universal artist, and its use opens up a whole new realm of copyright issues: A.I.s that Maroon 5 sings Taylor songs that sound like his Swift tunes, or perhaps he’s Napalm Death You can now create songs like the Celine Dion hits rendered by .
UMG is sending “left and right” takedown requests to streamers, the FT quoted an anonymous source as saying.
In an email last month, the company said, “It is possible that certain AI systems could have been trained on copyrighted content without obtaining the necessary consent or paying compensation from the rights holders who own or produce the content. I realized I had a personality,” he said. report. “We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists.” The website drayk.it, which delivered custom Drake songs to users, has since been shut down. I was.
However, the largest project in the field is Google’s MusicLM, which, according to a research paper cited in FT, can generate music from written descriptions, ingesting 280,000 hours of music. Google has not released a product after flagging the seemingly very obvious “potential abuse risk of creative content”. Such issues were found in about 1% of app-generated music. Google continues to develop the project.
AI has been around for years, but the launch of ChatGPT last fall brought unresolved copyright issues to the forefront of the music industry. Over 40 of his organizations participated last month, including The Recording Academy, National Music Publishers Assn. This is “to ensure that artificial intelligence technology is developed and used in ways that support human culture and artistry, not in ways that replace or erode it.”
UMG declined varietyrequests for further comment; Spotify and Apple either declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
Controlling about a third of the world’s music market, UMG didn’t hesitate to use their market strengths to draw a line in the sand. In 2016, Frank Ocean released a mostly instrumental (and barely funny) album from UMG’s Def Jam imprint, signed a deal, and the next day, he announced via an exclusive deal with Apple Music. The move prompted UMG chairman Lucian Grainge to end all exclusive distribution on individual streaming services, bringing the practice to a near halt. Did.
