Independent music distributor Symphonic Distribution has partnered with Sureel AI to let its artists track how AI uses their work and, the companies say, “participate in AI-driven revenue”. Sureel, an attribution platform that tracks how music is used by AI, is owned by Warner Music Group, which acquired it in June for an undisclosed sum.
Source: WMG’s Sureel teams up with Symphonic to let artists track AI use of their music
Canadian performing rights society SOCAN has partnered with Musical AI to build infrastructure that identifies when songwriters’ and composers’ work is used by artificial intelligence. The goal, the two organizations said on Tuesday (July 21), is to make sure those creators are credited and paid when it happens.
Source: Canada’s SOCAN names Musical AI as its attribution partner to credit and pay creators
Reddit, the online message board that powers a swath of Google search results, has discussed shutting off the technology giant’s access to its content for AI use, according to people familiar with the matter. It is part of a growing chorus of online media companies expressing frustration with the tech giant as AI changes the way people ask questions, siphons off search traffic and upends publishers’ revenue models.
Source: Google Was a Lifeline for Publishers. Now Some Are Thinking of Cutting It Off.
As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. “The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” says on its site.
Source: AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop
Search referral traffic is in decline due to increasing usage of AI. This has been common knowledge among online publishers since the proliferation of chat interfaces and generated summaries in search results, and we now have concrete data to prove it with the AOP’s newly launched “Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study”.
Source: Google search traffic to leading UK publishers set to halve by Q3 2027
For publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company has increasingly incorporated A.I. into search. Google’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its A.I.-generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites and search traffic has dropped.
Source: Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed
Udio has selected content-security firm BuyDRM to protect the streaming of its AI-generated music. The Austin-based company will provide multi-DRM support across Google Widevine, Apple FairPlay, and Microsoft PlayReady through its KeyOS MultiKey Service. The deal, announced on July 14, forms part of the technical infrastructure behind Udio‘s move from copyright defendant to licensed music platform.
Source: Udio taps content-security BuyDRM to secure its AI music ‘walled garden’
The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers.
Source: Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius
Media research expert Nic Newman has warned the ability of AI models to provide “liquid content” in different formats is a “really serious challenge” to news media. He gave the example of asking Claude questions relating to the UK heatwaves, including where the UK stands in terms of air conditioning compared to other countries and previous temperature records. Claude was able to produce information in a Q&A format, generate graphs which were filterable by different parts of the world, and show Met Office warnings.
Source: Claude’s ability to remix ‘liquid content’ is ‘serious challenge for news media’
A new Edison Research at SSRS study commissioned by Spoken, an AI audiobook company, revealed that the company’s multi-voice productions achieved a higher favorability rating than human-narrated productions. “There’s opinions good and bad for AI among the American consumer, right, so we wanted to just purely get the reaction,” Edison Research vice president Megan Lazovick said. “That was what was really fascinating, was the response that people were open to AI and thought it enhanced their experience.”
Source: Surprise: Many People Prefer AI Audiobooks, New Study Finds