Data

Billions Are Flowing Into Music IP — Can Financial Systems Handle It?

IP acquisition is only the first step – one quickly followed by potentially overwhelming blocking and tackling. A typical catalog requires ingesting data from hundreds of platforms and sources spanning DSPs, sub-publishers, CMOs, and social media platforms, often in conflicting formats. And that’s just a working list of initial considerations to properly collect associated IP revenues, with downstream payouts and revenue splits another major area of concern.

Source: Billions Are Flowing Into Music IP — Can Financial Systems Handle It?

Spotify acquires music database WhoSampled

WhoSampled offers an extensive database of songs, samples, covers, remixes, artists, and more. According to its website, it’s now tracking more than 1.2 million songs and nearly 622,000 samples. That data is powering Spotify’s latest features, like its upcoming music discovery tool SongDNA. However, WhoSampled was known to Spotify for some time, as it had partnered with the streamer back in 2016 to allow its users to access their Spotify playlists and saved tracks in its app

Source: Spotify acquires music database WhoSampled | TechCrunch

Spotify rolls out expanded song credits, previews new ‘SongDNA’ for Premium users

Thus far, Spotify’s song credits included topline performers, songwriters and producers. The new credits expand that to include “all of the contributors who make each song possible,” including background vocalists, musicians, and engineers. “The more fans understand the careful craft that underpins the music they love, the deeper their fandom grows and the more invested they become in the people who create it,” Spotify said in a blog post.

Source: Spotify rolls out expanded song credits, previews new ‘SongDNA’ and ‘About the song’ features for Premium users

50,000 AI-music tracks are now uploaded to Deezer every day

Deezer says that roughly 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks are now uploaded every day, accounting for 34% of all music delivered to it. The new figures were published alongside the findings from a survey Deezer commissioned from Ipsos, covering 9,000 people in eight countries: the US, Japan, UK, Germany, France, Brazil, the Netherlands and Canada. The most eye-catching finding is that the survey involved respondents listening to two fully AI-generated tracks and one human song, then guessing which ones were AI. 97% failed the test.

Source: 50,000 AI-music tracks are now uploaded to Deezer every day

Publishing’s Survival Depends on Data, Says Elsevier Chairman

At last week’s Sharjah Publishers Conference, Y.S. Chi warned that publishers need to build richer data infrastructures or face extinction.  “No publisher will survive five years from today if they don’t have data,” he said last week at the 15th Sharjah Publishers Conference. “I don’t care how well you edit and publish books. If you don’t have data, you will make wrong decisions.” At the top of his agenda was addressing perhaps the most urgent threat to publishing: artificial intelligence. “You can’t do AI unless you have data,” Chi explained.

Source: Publishing’s Survival Depends on Data, Says Elsevier Chairman

Big Tech Is Spending More Than Ever on AI and It’s Still Not Enough

Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are already planning to pour $400 billion into artificial intelligence efforts this year. They all say it’s nowhere near enough. “We’ve been short [on computing power] now for many quarters. I thought we were going to catch up. We are not. Demand is increasing,” said Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer. “When you see these kinds of demand signals and we know we’re behind, we do need to spend.”

Source: Big Tech Is Spending More Than Ever on AI and It’s Still Not Enough

Hundreds of thousands of videos from news publishers were used to train AI models

YouTube channels from major news publishers and creators were in video data sets used by Microsoft, Meta, Snap, Runway, and Bytedance. For example, 11,604 videos from the official YouTube channel of The New York Times across 11 different data sets are in the database. Over 8,000 of these videos, though, came from a single training data source — Runway Gen-3.

Source: Hundreds of thousands of videos from news publishers like The New York Times and Vox were used to train AI models

Google AI Overviews ‘leading to affiliate revenue drop of 20-40% at some publishers’

Google’s AI Overviews are reducing traffic to review content and buyers’ guides by up to 50%, according to an affiliate marketing specialist. Paul Cunliffe, who works with publishers on their affiliate channels, described the arrival of AI Overviews as a “real challenge at the moment in the affiliate space”. Publishers can earn affiliate revenue by linking to products and services, taking a commission when readers make a purchase by clicking through a link.

Source: Google AI Overviews ‘leading to affiliate revenue drop of 20-40% at some publishers’

Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, has updated millions of websites’ robots.txt files in an effort to force Google to change how it crawls them to fuel its AI products and initiatives. There have been lawsuits, efforts to kick-start new marketplaces to ensure compensation, and more—but few companies have the kind of leverage Cloudflare does. Its products and services back something close to 20 percent of the web, and thus a significant slice of the websites that show up on search results pages or that fuel large language models.

Source: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews Overlaps Organic Search By 54%

New research from BrightEdge offers insights into how Google’s AI Overviews ranks websites across different verticals, with implications for what SEOs and publishers should be focusing on. The data shows that 54% of the AI Overviews citations matched the web pages ranked in the organic search results. This means that 46% of citations do not overlap with organic search results.  Could this be an artifact of Google’s FastSearch algorithm?

Source: Google AI Overviews Overlaps Organic Search By 54%

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