Auttomatic, the company that owns WordPress and Tumblr, is making a deal to provide data from their sites to help train OpenAI and Midjourney. “We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control,” an Auttomatic blog post says. “Our partnerships will respect all opt-out settings.”
Source: Tumblr is selling user data to train AI. Things could get weird.
With media companies like Vice shuttering last week, and mass layoffs at august publications like the Los Angeles Times last month, it feels like a vulnerable moment for humans who write. And the well-known propensity for programs like ChatGPT to write passable — if uninspiring — prose is well documented, but with its jaw-dropping new video model Sora, ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI has renewed our collective sense that AI companies are on a mission to put people out of work.
Source: AI ‘writers’ are mostly worthless right now. But that won’t last.
Adobe’s latest generative AI experiment aims to help people create and customize music without any professional audio experience. Announced during the Hot Pod Summit in Brooklyn on Wednesday, Project Music GenAI Control is a new prototype tool that allows users to generate music using text prompts and then edit that audio without jumping over to dedicated editing software.
Source: Adobe’s new prototype generative AI tool is the “Photoshop” of music-making and editing
The companies are battling over how much TikTok pays Universal—the world’s largest music company—to make the label’s vast catalog of songs available to one billion-plus social-media users worldwide. The fight escalated this week, with Universal bringing on what many in the industry call “the nuclear option”—requiring TikTok to take down songs on which any songwriter signed to Universal’s publishing division has a credit.
Source: Universal Music Deploys the ‘Nuclear Option’ Against TikTok
ASCAP collections grew 14.1% to $1.737 billion in 2023 and payouts to songwriters and publishers increased 14.7% to $1.592 billion, the performance rights organization reported Wednesday (Feb. 28). Those figures represent a record year for ASCAP in both revenue buckets, as well as all-time highs for any U.S. performance rights organization ever, ASCAP claimed.
Source: ASCAP Reports Record Collections, Distribution While Casting Shade on For-Profit Competitors
T
he bruising battle over royalties between Universal Music Group and TikTok entered a new and more severe stage in the early hours of Tuesday as songs published by UMG began to be removed from the platform. The standoff, which began earlier this month, initially saw recordings owned or distributed by UMG removed from the platform, but now is extending to a much larger number of songs by including those published by the company.
Source: TikTok Begins Removing Universal Music Publishing Songs, Expanding Royalty Battle
Streaming has leveled the playing field in many ways since it became the main platform for music around a decade ago, and the fact that independent artists — which Spotify defines as artists signed to a non-major labels or self-releasing — now account for half of that total, for the first time, is evidence. With some 236 million paying subscribers, Spotify remains by far the world’s largest paid music-streaming service, with the U.S. its biggest territory.
Source: Spotify Generated $4.5 Billion for Independent Artists and Labels in 2023
European independent-music body Impala is weighing in to the row over Apple Music’s plans to give music catalogues that are available as spatial audio a boost in its royalties calculations. “The boost in royalties, as already highlighted in the press, is less accessible to independents,” claimed Impala in a statement this morning. Impala wants Apple to “discuss alternative ways, rather than unilaterally introducing significant changes, resulting in the redirection of revenues from independents to be redistributed among the major players”.
Source: Impala joins indie critics of Apple Music’s royalty changes – Music Ally
Paris-based startup Mistral AI is stepping up into the big leagues, launching Mistral Large to compete with other top-tier large-language models and chatbot intended to rival market leader Open AI’s ChatGPT. “Mistral Large achieves strong results on commonly used benchmarks, making it the world’s second-ranked model generally available through an API,” the company said.
he biggest record labels in music are trying to figure out how to grapple with the rise of artificial intelligence. When Universal Music Group (UMG) pulled its songs from TikTok on Feb. 1 partly because of a concern artists weren’t being protected from artificial intelligence, it triggered a debate across the industry about whether to embrace the new technology, fight it, or both.