OpenAI said Wednesday it intends to dismiss all claims made by Elon Musk in a recent lawsuit and suggested that the billionaire entrepreneur didn’t really have that much impact on its development and success. In a blog post, the Microsoft-backed startup revealed that since its inception in 2015, it had raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite his initial commitment to provide as much as $1 billion in funding. “Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control,” OpenAI wrote.
The EU’s new competition rules are going live — here’s how tech giants are responding
The EU has designated six companies as gatekeepers, which it defines as large digital platforms providing “core” services like app stores, search engines, and web browsers. The DMA’s restrictions apply to specific services within these companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. Here’s what each has been doing to meet — and fight — those demands.
Source: The EU’s new competition rules are going live — here’s how tech giants are responding
The AI bassist: Sony’s vision for a new paradigm in music production
In a recent paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, researcher Marco Pasini and his colleagues Stefan Lattner and Maarten Grachten at Sony CSL, introduced a new latent diffusion model that can create realistic and effective bass accompaniments for musical tracks. Diffusion models are deep learning techniques that can learn to generate images, audio or other samples that capture the overall structure underlying a dataset.
Source: The AI bassist: Sony’s vision for a new paradigm in music production
Music royalties trading platform JKBX launches with approval from the SEC
JKBX has announced that it has received qualification from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its assets. The result: as of this week, investors – including consumers aka ‘retail investors’ – can legally purchase shares in the royalty streams of hits via JKBX.com. The JKBX platform soft-launched last year, but while awaiting SEC qualification, its users could only ‘reserve’ (rather than outright buy) these royalty shares.
Source: Music royalties trading platform JKBX launches – with regulatory approval from the SEC
Media Insider: Will AI Wipe Out The Canadian Film And TV industry?
The ability of Canadian locations to stand in for American ones is a critical element in our own movie and TV industry. It brings billions of production dollars north of the 49th parallel. But if it suddenly becomes cheaper to stay in L.A. and use AI to create your location, rather than physically move to a “stand-in” location, our film and TV industry will dry up almost instantly.
Source: Media Insider: Will AI Wipe Out The Canadian Film And TV industry?
Disney Working to Get Streaming Platforms on Technical Par With Netflix, Iger Says
Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged the company is behind Netflix in terms of technical capabilities — and that it’s in the process of catching up. “When we launched Disney+ in 2019, our goal was to have basically robust video experiences at scale,” Iger said. “What we didn’t have was the technology that we needed to basically lower customer acquisition and retention cost, to essentially grow our margins by reducing marketing expenses.”
The music industry’s over-reliance on TikTok shows how lazy it has become
TikTok’s relationship with the music industry was never sustainable. As many digital media outlets realised in the mid-2010s, when they “pivoted to video” in an attempt to placate Facebook’s algorithm, only for the bottom to fall out of that platform, it’s never wise to place the fate of an entire industry in the hands of a private company whose motivations and modes of operation are opaque at best. Big stars who have built-in fanbases won’t be profoundly affected by their music being off TikTok, but new stars will.
Source: The music industry’s over-reliance on TikTok shows how lazy it has become | Shaad D’Souza
Why Musicians Are Doubling Down on an Unlikely Venue to Reach New Listeners
Artists are signing deals with game companies to debut new songs through interactive events and as background music for games themselves, in some cases weeks before those tracks are released on the likes of Spotify. Artists are also selling virtual goods featuring their likenesses and music for players’ avatars.
Source: Why Musicians Are Doubling Down on an Unlikely Venue to Reach New Listeners
Bryan Ferry Partners With Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists
The deal sees the company acquiring 50% of Ferry’s sound recording, publishing, and name, image and likeness rights from his solo work and Roxy Music catalog, which reaches back to the group’s galvanizing 1972 debut album and includes such hit songs as “Love Is the Drug,” “More Than This,” “Avalon,” “Virginia Plain,” “Dance Away,” “Slave to Love” and more. Further terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Three Publishing Veterans Form a New House, Authors Equity
Madeline McIntosh, Nina von Moltke, and Don Weisberg—most recently at Penguin Random House US and Macmillan, respectively—have joined forces to form a new publishing company. As its name implies, the publisher will operate outside of traditional publishing business models, offering no advances but paying authors a high percentage of a book’s profits—a model followed by some other types of hybrid publishers.
Source: Three Publishing Veterans Form a New House, Authors Equity