Newsletter
Ever since the start of the AI revolution late last year with the launch of ChatGPT and other language processing models, the music industry has expressed its concerns, as people are now using AIs to analyze existing music to generate original compositions. As a result, record label Universal Music Group (UMG) reportedly sent a letter to the streaming services, warning them against allowing AI labs to scrape millions of tracks to use as training data for their models.
This move from UMG follows a similar step taken by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in October 2022, where the body expressed its concerns that AI could produce very similar or almost as good as reference tracks by selected well-known sound recording artists.
UMG fears that this scraping of original songs to train AIs will allow them to copy top artists in an indistinguishable way. This is because these music generator AIs have become increasingly sophisticated and can now create convincing fakes of famous artists performing new cover versions of popular songs. For example, an AI-generated Jay-Z track was so good that it prompted one of the first successful copyright strikes after the artist’s agent, Roc Nation, had the song pulled from YouTube. On the other hand, systems like Google’s MusicLM are capable of generating entirely new compositions from text prompts.
Recent Changes to UK Intellectual Property
In an effort to assist in the provision of training data for AI systems, the UK government recently amended its intellectual property law to allow for the non-commercial use of legally acquired copyrighted material for AI research. However, some experts have criticized this as “data laundering” since people can legally use this research to train commercial models and still enjoy copyright exceptions.
Although AI-generated music is a fascinating innovation, it raises important copyright issues. Therefore, streaming platforms and companies like Google must take measures to prevent copyright infringement and compensate rights holders for their work. UMG has warned that it will take steps to safeguard its artists’ rights and the music industry as a whole.