- Universal Music Group (UMG) is launching a war against AI-generated songs
- Very worried about the transformations caused by other AIs like ChatGPT, the label requires streaming platforms to no longer allow these AIs to use the UMG catalog to train their model
- Rather than fight, some platforms are developing their own AI behind the scenes capable of generating songs
In case you didn’t know, generative AI isn’t just text or images anymore. Quite convincing projects make it possible to generate voices from scratch, based or not on the voices of real artists, or even pieces of music – from scratch. And if overall not everything is necessarily excellent, there are already some striking AI pieces of realism.
Like this cover of the famous song Jolene (originally written in 1973 by Dolly Parton), whose voice was generated from scratch by an AI called Holly+. Holly+ is not alone. There are for example MuseNet, MusicML, or even complete AIs that can generate music like IA Music Pro. Some streaming platforms are also developing solutions behind the scenes.
UMG is starting to worry about music AIs
There is, for example, the example of what has been developing since 2017 Creator Technology Research Lab that Spotify opened in Paris in 2016. Its mission? Continue the “development of tools to help artists in their creative process”. It is headed by François Pachet, a leading French specialist in artificial intelligence.
In 2018, the lab released its first album composed entirely by an AI, called “Hello World”. Before doing it again in 2022 with “Melancholia” which presumably uses a much better model. We let you be the judge (we particularly recommend the title entitled Océan Noir):
Obviously, to work, all these AIs train from the vast musical catalog to which these platforms have purchased the rights. A reality that has not escaped Universal Music Group, one of the biggest music labels in the world – which owns the rights to a large part of the catalog of songs from Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms. We are talking about a third, approximately of all of these catalogs…
Universal faces a legal ‘blue screen’
This is why UMG has decided to send a missive addressed in particular to Spotify and Apple Music – which has just bought the startup AI Music which, as its name suggests, develops music from artificial intelligence – whose goal is to generate a soundtrack that adapts to the mood and desires of users, in real time. Perfect to accompany morning jogging for example. But also to annoy UMG.
The label explains in its letter: “We are aware that some AI systems may have been trained with copyrighted content without obtaining the required consents from rights holders or paying them financial compensation”. The problem for Universal is that the argument still seems pretty flawed from a legal standpoint.
Indeed, anyone has the right to imitate an artist while creating a new original song from it. Not only nothing prohibits it, but as a bonus it is not possible to derive rights from it. And when we say anyone, you will have understood that there is no distinction between human and AI…
