AI-Generated Music Is About to Flood Streaming Platforms
There are already countless songs on Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. And as tunes become easier to create, anyone can add to the copyright din.

www.wired.com/story/ai-generated-music-streaming-services-copyright/

Excerpts:

IT STARTS WITH a familiar intro, unmistakably the Weeknd’s 2017 hit “Die for You.” But as the first verse of the song begins, a different vocalist is heard: Michael Jackson. Or, at least, a machine simulation of the late pop star’s voice.

It’s just one example of how artificial intelligence is seeping into the music industry. Surf YouTube or TikTok and you'll find many convincing AI-made covers. The software covers.ai has a waiting list for new users. But there are also tools that can generate instrumentals from text, give people a starting beat or inspiration, and help them to edit tunes.

AI will no doubt speed the creation of music, but that acceleration comes at a time when music streaming services are already inundated with content. There are now more than 100 million songs on Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify. Listening to them all would take hundreds of years. Even more have been uploaded to SoundCloud. AI tools democratize music making. But there’s potential for a flood of AI-generated content to be unleashed onto streaming platforms, competing with real people and their compositions for the attention of your ears.

The music industry has often been trepidatious about innovation only to later embrace it. “Everything was seen as the end of music,” says Martin Clancy, editor of the 2022 book Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem. But AI developments are more than an automated drum machine, computerized synths, or even Napster. “AI is different—different because of its speed, its scale, its ability for personalization,” Clancy says. “It really can outcompete with human endeavor and has the ability to produce a huge amount of material.”

It’s also a boon to the amateur creator. People might use generators for fun rather than to rival trained musicians, but their work may still crowd the market, says Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst and consultant with MIDiA Research. That poses a challenge, because some music streamers don’t differentiate between professionally produced and amateur content the way that video does (think Netflix compared to YouTube or TikTok). “Spotify will become the place where large portions of consumer-created music ends up, mixing in with everything else,” Cirisano says.

Music streamers may brag about their libraries, but quantity isn’t quality. So many of those songs are never or rarely played. In 2022, 50 percent of audio tracks followed by the entertainment data company Luminate in the US had 10 or fewer on-demand streams, according CEO Rob Jonas. It’s a years-long trend that spurred Forgotify, a website that shuffles through unplayed songs from Spotify.

The music business is pushing back against AI. Universal Music Group, home to superstars like Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, and Bob Dylan, has urged Spotify and Apple to block AI tools from scraping lyrics and melodies from its artists’ copyrighted songs, the Financial Times reported last week. UMG executive vice president Michael Nash wrote in a recent op-ed that AI music is “diluting the market, making original creations harder to find, and violating artists’ legal rights to compensation from their work.”

The news came on the heels of a request from UMG that a rap about cats in the style of Eminem be removed from YouTube for violating copyright. But the music industry is worried about more than AI copycatting a vocal performance; it’s also fretting about machines learning from their artists’ songs. Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America submitted a list of AI scrapers to the US government, claiming that their “use is unauthorized and infringes our members’ rights” when they use copyrighted work to train models.

The new generative tech shows a tendency toward mimicry. Earlier this year, Google announced it had created an AI tool called MusicLM that can generate music from text. Enter a prompt asking for a “fusion of reggaeton and electronic dance music, with a spacey, otherworldly sound,” and the generator delivers a clip. But Google did not release the tool widely, noting in its paper that about 1 percent of the music generated matched existing recordings.

we really are living in the future

we really are living in the future


We're living in the present. How on Earth could we be living in the future? Do you mean we are living in "yesterday's future"? Sounds like you have "future shock", the term coined by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book of the same name.  Briefly stated, "future shock" was defined as "a state of distress or disorientation due to rapid social or technological change." The book was really very prescient for it's time and is still well worth reading, though some aspects are, of course, dated by now.

We're living in the present. How on Earth could we be living in the future? Do you mean we are living in "yesterday's future"? Sounds like you have "future shock", the term coined by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book of the same name.  Briefly stated, "future shock" was defined as "a state of distress or disorientation due to rapid social or technological change." The book was really very prescient for it's time and is still well worth reading, though some aspects are, of course, dated by now.


I thought the future began in 2006, when JT released "SexyBack", lol

I thought the future began in 2006, when JT released "SexyBack", lol
I don't think I've ever heard you mention that song before!

I don't think I've ever heard you mention that song before!


I think I have before, at least in the 2006 thread. I was just joking/being sarcastic about how the futurism of that song has been overstated in this forum, especially when the Y2K era which predates it had a lot more futurism imo. Now Darude's "Sandstorm" sounds very futuristic. I didn't even know the title of that song until I watched a recent episode of How I Met Your Father. It was hard to find that song as it doesn't have lyrics, and as futuristic as the Y2K era was we didn't have the Shazam app on those old Nokia phones, lol.

I think I have before, at least in the 2006 thread. I was just joking/being sarcastic about how the futurism of that song has been overstated in this forum, especially when the Y2K era which predates it had a lot more futurism imo. Now Darude's "Sandstorm" sounds very futuristic. I didn't even know the title of that song until I watched a recent episode of How I Met Your Father. It was hard to find that song as it doesn't have lyrics, and as futuristic as the Y2K era was we didn't have the Shazam app on those old Nokia phones, lol.


Can you define what you mean by "futurism" or "futuristic" in this context?

Can you define what you mean by "futurism" or "futuristic" in this context?


It's kind of hard to at least by using words but it's basically the state of something different from what you're used to, such as advances in technology that makes you feel like you're living in a sci-fi movie. With music it's a change from conventional instruments to hi-tech use giving it an electronic sound. The late 90's felt this way with the approaching Y2K.