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Title: First 'AI Music Creator' Signed by Record Label. More Ahead, or Just a
Copyright Quandry?

Link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/0...

"I have no musical talent at all," says Oliver McCann. "I can't sing, I can't
play instruments, and I have no musical background at all!" But the
Associated Press describes 37-year-old McCann as a British "AI music creator"
- and last month McCann signed with an independent record label "after one of
his tracks racked up 3 million streams, in what's billed as the first time a
music label has inked a contract with an AI music creator." McCann is an
example of how ChatGPT-style AI song generation tools like Suno and Udio have
spawned a wave of synthetic music, a movement most notably highlighted by a
fictitious group, Velvet Sundown, that went viral even though all its songs,
lyrics and album art were created by AI. Experts say generative AI is set to
transform the music world. However, there are scant details, so far, on how
it's impacting the $29.6 billion global recorded music market, which includes
about $20 billion from streaming. The most reliable figures come from music
streaming service Deezer, which estimates that 18% of songs uploaded to its
platform every day are purely AI generated, though they only account for a
tiny amount of total streams, hinting that few people are actually listening.
Other, bigger streaming platforms like Spotify haven't released any figures
on AI music... "It's a total boom. It's a tsunami," said Josh Antonuccio,
director of Ohio University's School of Media Arts and Studies. The amount of
AI generated music "is just going to only exponentially increase" as young
people grow up with AI and become more comfortable with it, he said.
[Antonuccio says later the cost of making a hit record "just keeps winnowing
down from a major studio to a laptop to a bedroom. And now it's like a text
prompt - several text prompts." Though there's a lack of legal clarity over
copyright issues.] Generative AI, with its ability to spit out seemingly
unique content, has divided the music world, with musicians and industry
groups complaining that recorded works are being exploited to train AI models
that power song generation tools... Three major record companies, Sony Music
Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, filed lawsuits last
year against Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. In June, the two sides
also reportedly entered negotiations that could go beyond settling the
lawsuits and set rules for how artists are paid when AI is used to remix
their songs. GEMA, a German royalty collection society, has sued Suno,
accusing it of generating music similar to songs like "Mambo No. 5" by Lou
Bega and "Forever Young" by Alphaville. More than 1,000 musicians, including
Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Damon Albarn, released a silent album to protest
proposed changes to U.K. laws on AI they fear would erode their creative
control. Meanwhile, other artists, such as will.i.am, Timbaland and Imogen
Heap, have embraced the technology. Some users say the debate is just a
rehash of old arguments about once-new technology that eventually became
widely used, such as AutoTune, drum machines and synthesizers.

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