“Most people know Sesac as a US-based performing rights organization. But, over the last eight years, we’ve acquired eleven companies and organically grown and broadened our business model…” That’s John Josephson speaking: the CEO who has overseen Sesac Music Group’s expansion into an organisation with three new business lines alongside its traditional business, and operations in territories well beyond the US.
Source: Sesac Music Group talks acquisitions, expansion and the fight against fraud
Grainge says the advent of AI technology has reached a point where Universal Music must “be completely at the epicenter of its application. An example he uses is the Beatles’ 2023 single “Now and Then” which used AI to isolate and clean up an old recording of John Lennon singing. “It’s a brilliant song—great lyrics, fabulous performance, incredibly emotive—that unless we’d had AI to individualize different recordings, would have never come to light, “Grainge told the L.A. Times.
Source: Lucian Grainge Isn’t Mincing Words on AI Music and IP Theft
Throughout its history, the publishing industry has always needed a boogeyman to represent new developments threatening the good old way of doing things. “Barnes & Noble was that for a while because it was a chain and because they had centralized bookselling,” says Boris Kachka, author of Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House. “Then Amazon became the big bad guy, and Barnes & Noble looked old-school all of a sudden.”
Source: Is AI the Bitter End—or the Lucrative Future—of Book Publishing?
Anti-fraud startup Beatdapp continues to make headlines with its data on just how many music streams might be illegitimate – most recently in a Sky News story suggesting that criminals might be making up to $3bn a year from streaming fraud. Now the company has announced its latest partnership with a music service trying to tackle this. Electronic music-focused DSP Beatport is going to be using Beatdapp’s fraud-detection technology.
Source: Beatport and Beatdapp team up to tackle music-streaming fraud
YouTube is turning to artificial intelligence to try to simultaneously appease copyright holders of songs while making life a little easier for those who upload videos with songs they don’t have permission to use. Instead of just taking down a video with copyrighted audio the uploader doesn’t own, they can use a new AI tool to remove the protected song without erasing the rest of the video’s audio track.
Source: YouTube will use AI to snip copyrighted music and not silence your whole video
In a move that blends Hollywood nostalgia with cutting-edge technology, a new frontier is being charted by AI company ElevenLabs. They’re set to revive the voices of iconic Hollywood stars like Judy Garland, James Dean, and Burt Reynolds for their latest Reader app, slated to transform written text into dynamic audio experiences.
Source: Hollywood Stars to Narrate Audio Content Posthumously — AI In Hollywood
Google’s DeepMind researchers have unveiled a new method to accelerate AI training, significantly reducing the computational resources and time needed to do the work. This new approach to the typically energy-intensive process could make AI development both faster and cheaper, according to a recent research paper—and that could be good news for the environment.
Source: New AI Training Technique Is Drastically Faster, Says Google – Decrypt
Warner Music Group has formally warned AI companies of training their models on protected media and other assets without a license. WMG forwarded the relevant notice to a number of high-profile artificial intelligence players, several of which are grappling with litigation over alleged copyright infringement. And that litigation centers mainly on the media, apparently including copyrighted works, used to train the underlying AI systems.
Source: Warner Music Warns AI Companies About Unlicensed Training
The U.S. Copyright Office has finalized a new rule aimed at ensuring that songwriters who invoke termination rights to regain control of their music will actually start getting paid streaming royalties after they do so. The provision, issued on Tuesday, will overturn what the Copyright Office called an “erroneous” earlier policy by the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which critics feared would have kept sending money from streamers like Spotify to former owners in perpetuity, long after a songwriter took back ownership.
Source: ‘Landmark Victory’: Copyright Office Finalizes Rule Change On Streaming Royalties
Designed to help prevent style mimicry and even poison AI models to discourage data scraping without an artist’s consent or compensation, The Glaze Project’s tools are now in higher demand than ever. But just as Glaze’s userbase is spiking, a bigger priority for the Glaze Project has emerged: protecting users from attacks disabling Glaze’s protections—including attack methods exposed in June by online security researchers in Zurich, Switzerland.
Source: Tool preventing AI mimicry cracked; artists wonder what’s next