Where the money goes in the music business has always been an issue of towering importance, but it has never been under greater scrutiny, both within the industry and publicly. “[Regarding] educating on where the money goes, I think there’s a lot to do there,” says Davies. “There is a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding.” Key to this, he says, are DiMA’s efforts around “modernizing of licensing and operations”.
Rights
Kiss Sells Catalog, Name, Likeness and More to Pophouse Entertainment for $300 Million
Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Kiss have sold their music catalog, name, image and likeness — including their iconic makeup designs — to Pophouse Entertainment, the Sweden-based music investment firm behind ABBA’s “Voyage” hologram show. While terms of the deal were not officially announced, Bloomberg and Associated Press said it was worth upwards of $300 million.
Source: Kiss Sells Catalog, Name, Likeness and More to Pophouse Entertainment for $300 Million
Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, 200 artists say AI poses existential threat to their livelihoods
On Tuesday, the Artist Rights Alliance (ARA) announced an open letter critical of AI signed by over 200 musical artists, including Pearl Jam, Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, and the estate of Frank Sinatra. In the letter, the artists call on AI developers, technology companies, platforms, and digital music services to stop using AI to “infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”
Source: Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, 200 artists say AI poses existential threat to their livelihoods
Data Scientist: The Coming Copyright Reckoning for Generative AI
Works that humans create belong to those humans (even if they are jotted down on a napkin). Paying every creator for the rights to their work is financially infeasible for the volumes of data we need to train even a small generative AI model. So, is it fair use for us to feed other people’s work into a training data set and create generative AI models? Let’s go over the Fair Use tests and see where we land.
Ed Newton-Rex: Suno is aiming to generate $120 billion per year. But is it trained on copyrighted recordings?
When an AI company doesn’t reveal its training data sources, the best chance we have of working out those sources is to use the model and see whether we can find output that resembles copyrighted material. Output that resembles copyrighted material is a strong indicator that that material was part of the training data. I, and others, have found that Suno regularly outputs music that closely resembles copyrighted material.
Stability AI Launches Stable Audio 2.0 With Audio-to-Audio Generation Feature
Stability AI has launched Stable Audio 2.0, adding key new functions to the company’s text-to-music generator. Stable Audio 2.0 features audio-to-audio generation, allowing users to manipulate any audio sample they want using text-based AI prompts. Its terms of service, however, requires that any audio uploaded to this tool is free of copyrighted material, with the tool employing a content recognition filter to ensure compliance.
Source: Stability AI Launches Stable Audio 2.0 With Audio-to-Audio Generation Feature
Changes to Spotify’s royalty model, including the 1,000 annual streams royalty policy, are officially live as of April 1
Changes to the way Spotify calculates recorded royalties went live on the platform as of Monday. Spotify says it won’t share the number of unique listeners required to become eligible for royalties “to prevent further manipulation by bad actors”. Spotify said in a blog post that “99.5% of all streams” on its platform “are of tracks that have at least 1,000 annual streams”, and that “each of those tracks will earn more under this policy”.
For Data-Guzzling AI Companies, the Internet Is Too Small
Companies racing to develop more powerful artificial intelligence are rapidly nearing a new problem: The internet might be too small for their plans. Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available pool of quality public data online at the same time that some data owners are blocking access to AI companies.
Source: For Data-Guzzling AI Companies, the Internet Is Too Small
4 Visual AI Platforms Proving That AI Can Thrive with Properly Licensed Content
The responsible utilization of data in AI development is a critical issue, and a select group of visual AI platforms are leading by example, demonstrating that AI can flourish while respecting intellectual property rights and fairly compensating creators. At the forefront of this movement are four pioneering platforms that have taken proactive steps to ensure their AI models are trained exclusively on properly licensed content.
Source: 4 Visual AI Platforms Proving That AI Can Thrive with Properly Licensed Content – Kaptur
Hipgnosis Songs Fund Audit Says Fund ‘Failed to Perform’
Shot Tower Capital has engaged in an independent audit of Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s assets, lowering the valuation of its assets by 26%. This follows a report on March 18 that revealed a double-counting error in Hipgnosis’ accrued revenue, with the board announcing a 7.6% reduction to its operative net asset value (NAV). The report also finds that Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s acquisition underwriting was “below music industry standards.”
Source: Hipgnosis Songs Fund Audit Says Fund ‘Failed to Perform’