The Mechanical Licensing Collective, or MLC, is now trumpeting cumulative payouts of more than $1 billion to songwriters, publishers, and other compositional IP owners since its formal inception in 2020. That heady payout, however, is being rivaled by unallocated ‘black box’ royalty accounts that may also be approaching the $1 billion threshold. MLC chief executive Kris Ahrend has declined multiple requests by Digital Music News to clarify the specific black box amounts held by the organization.
February, 2023
AI art ‘will become the new normal’
Artists in the field stress that AI is prompting a paradigm shift. Jon Rafman says: “I have been using AI in one form or another since I began making art on computers in the 1990s. I only truly started using image-generating AI tools around 2020. But the levels of sophistication of the AI algorithms have developed so rapidly that it feels like I have moved from using a 3000-year-old ancient lyre to a Stradivarius violin in two short years.”
EC narrows its Apple music-streaming investigation to ‘anti-steering’ issues
The European Commission launched a pair of formal antitrust investigations of Apple in June 2020. Now there’s a development. The Commission has sent Apple a ‘Statement of Objections’ that zeroes in on music streaming. It’s a follow-up to a previous Statement of Objections sent in April 2021. Today’s missive takes the in-app purchasing issue off the table: the Commission “does no longer take a position as to the legality of the IAP obligation for the purposes of this antitrust investigation”.
Source: EC narrows its Apple music-streaming investigation to ‘anti-steering’ issues – Music Ally
NFT Royalties Are ‘Not Going Away on SuperRare’: Co-Founder Jon Perkins
Creator royalties, or a lack thereof, on NFT marketplaces have been the niche’s biggest talking point of late. For SuperRare though, the decision to pay creators was already made five years ago. According to the project’s co-founder and CTO Jonathan Perkins, when SuperRare launched in 2018, the royalty aspect was going to be a “standard.” “What I think we’re seeing pan out now is just the kind of chaos of a new market taking shape.”
Source: NFT Royalties Are ‘Not Going Away on SuperRare’: Co-Founder Jon Perkins – Decrypt
Musicians’ Union Unveils ‘Milestone’ Pacts With the BBC, Others
London’s Musicians’ Union has announced the completion of a “significant round” of collective bargaining negotiations with the BBC, Sky, and others, which it says will deliver “meaningful pay increases” to its approximately 32,000 members in the approaching years. According to the Musicians’ Union, the three-year BBC tie-up will deliver a 7.5 percent rate boost in 2023 and additional 2.3 percent raises in 2024 and 2025.
Source: Musicians’ Union Unveils ‘Milestone’ Pacts With the BBC, Others
Spotify dips a toe in NFT space, via token-gated playlists
NFT band and brand KINGSHIP, which was launched by Universal Music Group as a virtual band of cartoon apes through its Web3 label 10:22PM in late 2021, announced in a series of tweets on Wednesday (February 22) that it’s teaming up with Spotify on a token-enabled playlist. According to one of the tweets, This is a special curated playlist exclusively for KINGSHIP Key Card (NFT) holders”.
Active learning is the future of generative AI
The majority of companies developing the application-layer AI that’s driving the widespread adoption of the technology still rely on supervised learning, using large swaths of labeled training data. Despite the impressive feats of foundation models, we’re still in the early days of the AI revolution and numerous bottlenecks are holding back the proliferation of application-layer AI.
Source: Active learning is the future of generative AI: Here’s how to leverage it
Why Artificial Intelligence Will Improve the Existence of Art
New artificial intelligence is able to mock contemporary art quicker than a critic with a paintbrush. Once it realizes the ability of DALL-E to replicate art, the industry will not be able to hide behind mere abstracted meaning, forcing artists to look to push themselves stylistically. Frankly, after decades of remorse and controversy over contemporary art, AI art may be the push the art world needs to steer artists toward new sights that DALL-E can not replicate.
Source: Tran: Why Artificial Intelligence Will Improve the Existence of Art
Songs in DJ Sets Are Notoriously Hard to Track — How a Dutch Rights Organization Is Paying Royalties
The process of collecting public performance royalties from DJ sets has long been a tricky one in the United States. That makes it difficult for artists with the rights to the music to get paid what they’re due. But one music market with a firm grasp on the performance royalties collection and distribution process as it relates to the dance world is The Netherlands, where electronic music is deeply woven into the country’s social fabric.
Source: Songs in DJ Sets Are Notoriously Hard to Track — How a Dutch Rights Organization Is Paying Royalties
AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines — but not fooling anyone
A short story titled “The Last Hope” first hit Sheila Williams’ desk in early January. Williams, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, reviewed the story and passed on it. At first, she didn’t think much of it; she reads and responds to writers daily as part of her job, receiving anywhere from 700 to 750 stories a month. But when another story, also titled “The Last Hope,” came in a couple weeks later by a writer with a different name, Williams became suspicious.
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Source: AI-generated fiction is flooding literary magazines — but not fooling anyone