It is no secret that songwriters are at the bottom of the streaming economy. But a new report shows they receive 9.5% of the average $.004 per stream. Of the over 300 songwriters surveyed for the study, only 10% earn more than $30,000 annually, while over half (54%) earn between $0 and $1,000. Some 67% of the respondents said the “lack of meaningful streaming income” is their primary challenge.
Source: Songwriters Are Getting Screwed by Streaming Even Worse Than They’d Thought, New Study Shows
Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) on Wednesday are formally introducing an updated version of the Nurture Originals, Foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe Act, or No Fakes Act, a major entry in the congressional debate over AI guardrails. The bill, initially unveiled as a discussion draft late last year, would give people a federal property right to approve the use of their voice, appearance or likeness — and expose those who create or distribute an unauthorized replica to legal liability.
Source: Analysis | Senators want to prevent the next Scarlett Johansson AI voice fiasco
Given the gaps in existing legal protections, the Office recommends that Congress enact a new federal law that protects all individuals from the knowing distribution of unauthorized digital replicas. The Office also offers recommendations on the elements to be included in crafting such a law.
Negotiations between the tech and news industries over AI have mostly focused on providing data for the broad training of large language models (LLMs) — but now, deal talks are shifting to address narrower use cases, where news publishers may have more leverage.
Hundreds of websites trying to block the AI company Anthropic from scraping their content are blocking the wrong bots, seemingly because they are copy/pasting outdated instructions to their robots.txt files, and because companies are constantly launching new AI crawler bots with different names that will only be blocked if website owners update their robots.txt.
Source: Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)
Ask almost any publishing CEO his or her sales, sales growth, net profit, returns percentage, advance write-offs, marketing expenditure, and much else, and they’ll know the answers. But ask how much a company has earned worldwide from collective licensing income through reproduction rights organizations (RROs), and that CEO won’t have a clue—and may not even know what an RRO is.
In a new paper from Imperial College London experts, researchers propose a mechanism to detect the use of data for AI training. They hope that their proposed method will serve as a step towards greater openness and transparency in a rapidly evolving field of Generative AI, and will help authors better understand how their texts are used.
Source: Phantom data could show copyright holders if their work is in AI training data
Investment giant Apollo Global Management is backing Sony Music Group to the tune of $700 million to help the company fund music acquisitions, it was announced Friday (July 26). The deal could provide the financial assistance needed for Sony’s planned acquisition of Queen‘s recording and music publishing catalogs. Sources have told Billboard the band is seeking $1.2 billion for its catalogs and ancillary income stream.
Source: Sony Music Receives $700M from Apollo Global for Music Investments
The ChatGPT parent company addressed publisher concerns about AI-driven search directly in its post announcing the prototype on Thursday, saying SearchGPT “is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches.” The prototype is not yet open to the public, having launched for now “to a small group of users and publishers to get feedback.”
Source: OpenAI testing prototype search engine with news publishers
According to Spotify: “If the MLC were entirely successful in this case, the additional royalties that would be due in relation to the period March 1, 2024 to June 30, 2024 would be approximately €46 million ($49.5 million) of which approximately €35 million relates to the three months ended June 30, 2024, plus potentially penalties and interest, which we cannot reasonably estimate.”
Source: Spotify estimates that it would have to pay out $50m if the MLC wins its bundling lawsuit