The music creator economy was thrust into the wider music industry’s limelight with the Covid lockdowns triggering a surge in new creators. Our latest music creator report shows that progressively more creators are starting with lower expectations for streaming. Their royalty expectations are already so low that this is no longer a pain point for them. Instead, they are becoming critical of streaming’s ability to further their careers, focusing on the medium’s closed door between them and their fans.
MIDiA: A Music creator economy recalibration
GEMA proposes licensing model for AI-generated music
GEMA, a German performing rights collection society and licensing body, has introduced a licensing model for AI providers, seeking to address the use of copyrighted music in AI training and the creation of AI-generated songs. GEMA proposes that authors should receive compensation beyond a one-time payment for training data. It suggests that such one-off payments may not sufficiently compensate authors given the potential revenues from AI-generated content.
Source: GEMA proposes licensing model for AI-generated music
Music Industry Funding Fell in Q3 ’24 Despite Some Positive Signs
Overall, Q3 2024’s funding was significantly beneath that delivered by Q3 2023, north of $2.56 billion across 30 rounds. The older period’s average round size was $85.43 million, in excess of three times more than the average for 2024’s third quarter. Despite the decrease, Q3 2024 didn’t lack encouraging funding takeaways, including the mentioned strong showing between mid-August and mid-September, TickPick’s noted quarter-billion-dollar raise, and others.
Source: Music Industry Funding Fell in Q3 ’24 Despite Some Positive Signs
Zuckerberg: creators, publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter. In an interview with The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, Zuckerberg said Meta will likely strike “certain partnerships” for useful content. But if others demand payment, then — as it’s done with news outlets — the company would prefer to walk away.
Source: Mark Zuckerberg: creators and publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI
TikTok vs. Merlin: Licensing Impasse Looms for Indie Collective
A letter sent from Merlin to its members states TikTok has walked away from negotiations with the collective in favor of individual deals. “TikTok has asked us for an ‘orderly transition’ to do direct deals with those members they deem worthy. As you know, Merlin was founded to stand up for and champion its members. We will not support an approach that devalues our community,” the letter continues.
Source: TikTok vs. Merlin: Licensing Impasse Looms for Indie Collective
AI crawlers are hammering sites and nearly taking them offline
Kyle Wiens recognized something was wrong in July when his staff at iFixit began receiving alerts about high traffic on their cellphones. They also were able to identify what had caused the issue: It turned out to be a web crawler sent out into the world by Anthropic, makers of the Claude chatbot, to try and gather training data.
Source: AI crawlers are hammering sites and nearly taking them offline
U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers, Issues Broad Injunction
A New York federal court has ordered the operators of shadow library LibGen to pay $30 million in copyright infringement damages. The default judgment comes with a broad injunction that affects third-party services including domain registries, browser extensions, CDN providers, IPFS gateways, advertisers, and more. These parties should stop facilitating access to the pirate site.
Source: U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers, Issues Broad Injunction * TorrentFreak
Generative AI & Licensing: A Special Report
To date, more than two dozen content owner deals with AI developers have been publicly confirmed, according to VIP+ research. A diverse range of publisher types are now engaged in licensing, with dealmaking rampant among news publishers, stock image companies and platforms such as Reddit and Stack Overflow. Yet the licensing market for generative AI is coming to fruition in a contentious and uncertain legal environment.
An author has questions on his publisher’s AI deal (opinion)
Informa, the academic publishing powerhouse and parent company of Routledge and Taylor & Francis, recently announced a deal with Microsoft that will feed a massive body of scholarly work to a generative AI system. If Informa’s decision portends a wave of similar deals between scholarly publishers and generative AI companies, the troubling precedent this sets could result in significant changes to the nature of academic publishing.
Source: An author has questions on his publisher’s AI deal (opinion)
Court Rules Against Photographer Who Sued AI Dataset for Copyright Theft
A German court has ruled against a photographer who sued the AI image dataset company LAION in a case that could have big implications. The dispute between the two parties wound up in the Hamburg Regional Court where on Friday the court ruled that LAION benefited from the exception of copyright infringement under Section 60(d) of Germany copyright law. A proviso that allows privileged research organizations to reproduce works even if granted an opt-out by the author of the work,
Source: Court Rules Against Photographer Who Sued AI Dataset for Copyright Theft