September’s Heated Topic: Shall We Limit The Influence Of AI In Music?
Spotify, Warner Music, and Hollywood have diverging plans.
Either you have a pragmatic approach — like The Rolling Stones classifying the AI as “toy town” — or a more worrisome vision, the debate has been going on and on. And will certainly continue.
The topic was raised after the explosion of a track cloning the voices of The Weeknd and Drake, ‘Heart On My Sleeve’, bringing millions of streams after its release (now removed on the platform).
Major players in the music industry, Universal Music & Deezer have responded by deciding to “double boost” some artist's earnings. Spotify, on the other hand, acknowledges that this debate is likely to extend over “many years”.
Art, fundamentally, is a cognitive process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thoughts, experiences, and sensory perception.
This brings us to a fundamental question: Can machine learning improve art quality while ensuring fair credit?
Spotify: No plan is the plan.
Earlier this week, the platform launched Spotify Jam, where friends who join a Jam can listen and add songs to the queue together, whether in-person or virtually, blending everyone’s musical taste into the party.
In the same breath, Daniel Ek told the BBC that he considers some valid uses of the tech in making music — but AI should not be used to impersonate human artists without their consent.
Mr Ek, who rarely makes a public appearance, said that we can already define three kinds of AI uses such as auto-tune (1), tools imitating artists (2), and tools creating music inspired by existing artistic creations (3), but not impersonating them.
Over the same month, the founder also shared his personal journey as an introverted entrepreneur, in a recent interview on The Dairy Of A CEO. He publicly shared that Spotify's success was so phenomenal that he managed to retire at 22 years old.
While AI is not banned in all forms, the Swedish audio streaming company does not allow its content to be used to train a machine learning or AI model.
Warner Music philosophy: “Embrace the technology”
Warner Music CEO, Robert Kyncl, anticipates that AI will bring significant (and qualitative) changes to the music industry within a year. Kyncl’s suggests to embrace the technology, rather than walking away from it:
“Look, you have to embrace the technology, because it’s not like you can put technology in a bottle…like the genie is not going back in.” Warner Music CEO, Robert Kyncl.
The CEO reassured the public by drawing a parallel between the current situation and the early days of YouTube:
In its initial stages, YouTube faced challenges related to the uploading of copyrighted content, which led to legal issues with various copyright holders and lawsuits. To resolve this issue, YouTube introduced Content ID, a fingerprinting software. Robert Kyncl actually worked closely on the case since he spent 12 years as YouTube’s chief business officer before moving to Warner Music in January 2023.
Adopting AI technology doesn’t imply passivity: Warner Music plans to address the rightsholder issues (and revenue attribution!) that come with AI-generated sounds using existing artists, in the near future.
The end of the Hollywood strike?
The WGA has announced an end to the writers’ strike. Whilst a few terms have been agreed on the new WGA deal such as:
- AI can’t be used to write scripts.
- Better streaming residuals and transparency regarding numbers.
- Increased minimum rates for writers.
- Minimum staffing for TV writers’ rooms.
The deal also gets a guarantee of at least 10 weeks of work for writers working on shows that have yet to be given the green light.
The growing urgency of AI’s expansion has repercussions not only for songwriters but also for producers, recording artists, and all other professionals engaged in the creative process.
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