Eric Shamlin, Television Academy governor and chair of its AI Task Force, urged members to take on an advocacy role in developing AI policies and frameworks, during a keynote at Saturday’s TV Academy AI Summit. “We must now lead,” he asserted. “We can’t afford to sit back and wait for others to shape how AI is implemented into our industry.”
Source: ‘We Must Now Lead’ Warns TV Academy Governor Eric Shamlin at AI Summit
Stanley ‘Artgerm’ Lau is one of the most established comic artists working today, he’s worked for Marvel, DC Comics and game publishers including Capcom and Square Enix. but the issues around generative AI and art haven’t escaped him. For Stanley, AI and its uses in art is a straightforward one – AI isn’t art, it can’t make art, and it isn’t creative. “I don’t agree that AI images are art,” Stanley states firmly.
Threatened by potential EU regulatory changes, the movie, music, and sports industries are vehemently defending the practice of geo-blocking, as an essential part of their business models. Rightsholders argue that eliminating geo-blockades would devalue content, force price hikes for consumers in some countries, and ultimately reduce investment in content and localized services.
Source: Movie, Music and Sports Industries Urge EU to Keep Geo-Blocking in Place * TorrentFreak
IFPI is expected to release the official global recorded music revenue results for 2024 this month, but in the meantime, the clever number crunchers at MIDiA Research have published their own estimates. And the headline stat from MIDiA’s new report: Global recorded music revenues rose 6.5% YoY to $36.2 billion. That marks a slowdown from 2023, when revenues rose 9.7% YoY, per MIDiA’s estimates.
Source: Global recorded music revenues rose 6.5% to $36.2bn in 2024, says MIDiA Research
Amid all the arguments about AI and copyright, it’s encouraging to see some companies making ethical training part of their launch pitches. An example outside music this week is Moonvalley, a US startup that has just unveiled its Marey AI video model. It’s billed as “the first fully clean AI model” with the company claiming it has only been trained on “owned or fully licensed source data”.
Source: Moonvalley’s Marey AI-video model was trained on licensed content
Music tech company Audoo has partnered with the German performing rights society GEMA for a music impact study utilizing Audoo’s meters. Audoo meters installed in hundreds of venues recognized over 130,000 tracks, contributing to the insights demonstrating that the use of background music increased sales in retail by an average of 8% and in gastronomy by an average of 5.4%.
Less than one month after bolstering support for AI-narrated audiobooks, Spotify has rolled out a publishing program for independent authors looking to sell “bite-sized” works. The diversification-minded service just recently revealed its latest audiobooks expansion. As many who’ve accessed on-platform audiobooks are aware, Spotify already supported self-publishing via Findaway Voices.
Source: Spotify Audiobooks Add Indie Publishing Program for Short Works
Bria, a visual gen AI platform built on what it says is “100% licensed data” has closed $40 million in Series B funding, bringing its total capital raised to $65 million. The company says it will also use the funds to widen the application of its patented attribution engine beyond images to music, video, and text generation.
Source: Bria raises $40m to expand patented attribution engine to AI-generated music content
Spotify updated its annual Loud and Clear report on Wednesday, confirming that for a second consecutive year, the streaming giant paid out half of its royalties to independent artists. Of the $10 billion Spotify doled out to music rights holders last year, it gave about $5 billion to indie labels and artists, the company said, a $500 million increase from 2023. The report comes weeks after Spotify announced its first-ever full year of profit, 18 years after the company was founded in 2006.
Source: Half of Spotify’s Royalties Are Going to Indie Artists
France’s leading publishing and authors’ associations have filed a lawsuit against U.S. tech giant Meta , opens new tab for allegedly using copyright-protected content on a massive scale without authorisation to train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This is the first such action against an AI giant in France but there is a wave of lawsuits notably in the United States against Meta and other tech companies.
Source: French publishers and authors file lawsuit against Meta in AI case