Since the growing use of Artificial intelligence, major music industry stakeholders are urging streaming platforms to limit their use of copyrighted songs for ‘training’. The emerging technology has the ability to harvest Melodies and lyrics from popular hit songs and imitate music identical to actual artists.
In a letter to streamers including Spotify and Apple Music, the record label Universal Music Group expressed fears that AI labs would scrape millions of tracks to use as training data for their models and copycat versions of pop stars.
Concerns have risen that AI could compose a song that lyrically resembles Artist A but with vocals and theme of Artist B. There was online buzz over a couple of AI generated samples like, Canadian rapper Drake rapping to Ice Spice’s 2022 hit ‘Munch’, Rihanna singing Beyoncé’s Grammy Best R&B record ‘Cuff It’, even Kanye west singing Justin Biebers ‘Love yourself’. The resemblance is alarming
A UMG spokesperson in a recent statement said “We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artist to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from from ingesting content that violates the right of artist and other creators”
The growing pushback against the technology and fight by Universal follows the heavy use of these AI generated music on Twitter and YouTube completely bypassing copyright laws and consent, which
Recall, Jay Z’s Roc nation had to pull down a very popular AI generated song impersonating his voice on YouTube. Even world class DJ David Guetta tried his hands on the software and was able to add a rap from an AI-generated Eminem to one of his songs – He was smart enough to avoid copyright issues by not releasing the song.
While some are thrilled by the immense possibilities that AI poses, others fear its ability to pose future problems in the music industry.