Technology

The Big Three record label, which touted its perceived role “as a Web 3.0 innovator” upon announcing Robert Kyncl as CEO, unveiled the tie-up with OpenSea via a formal release this morning. Five-year-old OpenSea – not to be confused with Quincy Jones-backed music NFT platform OneOf, which finalized a WMG partnership pact in January – has reportedly suffered a material sales-volume falloff in 2022 amid a broader crypto winter.

Source: Warner Music Group Announces OpenSea Partnership ‘To Expand Web3 Opportunities For Artists’

AI text-to-image generators have been making headlines in recent months, but researchers are already moving on to the next frontier: AI text-to-video generators. A team of machine learning engineers from Facebook’s parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text.

Source: Meta’s new text-to-video AI generator is like DALL-E for video

This week saw Napster’s newest owners, Hivemind and Alogrand, double down on their plans to expand the Napster brand into Web3, revealing that former Roblox Global Head of Music Jon Vlassopulos is joining the platform as its new CEO. Vlassopulos guided Roblox’s music strategy between August 2019 and April 2022, and during his tenure there, the platform struck partnerships with labels, publishers, management companies, artists, brands and startups.

Source: With fresh eight-figure financing, and a new CEO, Napster wants to take Web3 music to the mainstream

In a move that underscores the importance of attorneys in the NFT space, The Walt Disney Company announced it is looking to hire a corporate attorney who will provide legal advice and support for global NFT products among other responsibilities listed in the job description. This is the latest sign that major corporations are taking notice of what Web3 offers. As the NFT and DeFi industry grows, it will become increasingly crucial for NFT companies to have skilled legal representation.

Source: Disney’s Latest Web3 Move Highlights Importance of NFT Attorneys

This month, NFT platform Probably Nothing announced the launch of “Probably a Label,” a partnership with Warner Records that the firms are billing as the first Web3 record label. After the music business endured decades of bruising legal and policy fights over peer-to-peer file sharing, Probably Nothing co-founder Aaron Ahmadi billed the “weird and radical” partnership as a chance for the industry to try a more liberal approach to IP.

Source: Web3 upends IP

Kris Kashtanova, a New York-based artist and former programmer wrote to their Instagram page last week that their AI-generated art-based graphic novel titled Zarya of the Dawn received U.S. copyright registration. Noting other creators’ past failure to reach this milestone, it may be the first piece created using AI-art generators to receive such recognition from the U.S. Copyright Office.

Source: Artist Claims First U.S. Copyright for Graphic Novel Featuring AI Art

The company cited “open questions” and “unaddressed rights issues” with respect to the content used by artificial intelligence generators. For the most part, it’s being scraped and remixed from the work of human artists, who use the Internet as a venue for their work to connect with audiences and potential buyers. Not only do some see this as disenfranchising to artists but it also presents legal quicksand for image sites that decide to trade in AI-crafted content.

Source: Citing Copyright Concerns, Getty Images Bans AI-Generated Content

There’s a whole industry in music centered around interpolation: the act of inserting familiar elements of older songs into newer music to breed familiarity in audiences. Labels are doing everything they can to get you to listen to the music they produce — including relying on nostalgia, and it’s very big business.

Source: Will the future of music sound a lot like the past?

The White House has today released a “First-Ever Comprehensive Framework for Responsible Development of Digital Assets” outlining the conclusions and recommendations of various federal agencies after six months of studying the crypto industry. The directive to research crypto was given in President Biden’s executive order, signed in March this year.

Source: White House Releases ‘Comprehensive Framework’ for Crypto Regulation and Development – Decrypt

Before NFTs, the next wave of internet musicians was creating music for virality in short video clips. “There is no doubt that artists have been freed creatively by NFTs. They no longer have to write music that will work on a 30-second TikTok video,” says Stern. One example can be seen with NFT musician Sammy Arriaga, who leveraged his internet community on TikTok and Twitter to sell out ​​over 4,000 music NFTs.

Source: Web3 is creating a new genre of NFT-driven music