Sweden-headquartered Epidemic Sound has acquired Song Sleuth, an AI music recognition startup, betting on AI to solve one of the music industry’s most persistent challenges: tracking and monetizing songs used in user-generated content online. Epidemic Sound said the acquisition paves the way for the launch of a new service called Aentidote aimed at identifying unclaimed and undistributed royalties from remixes, covers, and live recordings.
Source: Epidemic Sound acquires AI startup Song Sleuth to tackle music’s ‘black box’ problem
Apple was fined 500 million euros ($570 million) and Meta was fined €200 million ($230 million) for breaking the Digital Markets Act, which was adopted in 2022. The European law aims to keep big tech companies from abusing their position as digital gatekeepers that can unilaterally impose requirements on users and businesses.
The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has gone into business with artificial-intelligence powerhouse OpenAI. Under the agreement, ChatGPT will display summaries, quotes and links to original reporting from the Washington Post in response to relevant search queries. ChatGPT will featur the Post’s content across politics, global affairs, business, technology and more, “always with clear attribution and direct links to full articles,” the newspaper said.
According to one music industry exec’s estimate, the controversial Spotify stream minimum cost emerging artists $47 million during 2024. As many know, that approach sees Spotify pay recording royalties only for tracks with at least 1,000 annual streams. Implemented (along with other changes) at the behest of the majors, the revamped model is effectively preventing the vast majority of uploaded recordings from generating payments.
