Artificial intelligence (AI) is spilling over into almost every industry imaginable, so it comes as no surprise that it's bringing a new challenge to music streaming platforms.
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Universal Music Group has made its thoughts clear: New AI technology relies on the unauthorized use of copyrighted material. With this belief, the company has told streaming platforms, including Apple Inc and Spotify Technology, to block all AI services from scraping melodies and lyrics from copyrighted songs.
The debate about copyrighted materials is a tough one. Everything these large language models (LLM) produce is scraped from existing sources, but used to create a technically new product. This makes it difficult to tell who actual owner is or should be.
These types of concerns are valid, but they’re not stopping the ultra-fast growth of AI technology. OpenAI has raised billions of dollars with millions of users and hundreds of startups using their API are now flooding the market. RAD AI built the worlds first marketing platform built to understand emotion, that has raised more than $3.3 million from retail investors, and a new take on LLM based technology arises seemingly daily.
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Universal Music Group Has Major Concerns
Universal Music Group controls approximately one-third of the global music market. That tells you why the company is so concerned about AI bots using its songs.
With each passing day, AI-generated songs reach a larger audience through streaming services. While the company is doing its best to send takedown requests, it’s relying on streaming services to take the next step — cutting off all access to its music catalog for those using it to train AI tools.
In an article published by Ars Technica, a person familiar with the situation shared the following:
“This next generation of technology poses significant issues. Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say, ‘Compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles.’ The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists’ intellectual property.”
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MusicLM By Google
MusicLM, a product developed by Google, is perhaps the most interesting innovation in the space. Thanks to advanced training from a data set of more than 280,000 hours of music, it’s able to instantly generate high-fidelity music.
Despite its early promise, Google is holding back on its release because of the “potential misappropriation of creative content.”
A Univeral Music Group spokesperson told Financial Times:
“We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators. We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists.”
With AI technology advancing by the day, Univeral Music Group — among others — will continue to do its part in fighting for the rights of its artists.
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