The UK government has announced an over $500 million investment, including in the music space, under its Creative Industries Sector Plan. That £380 million (currently $512.9 million) package was disclosed today as part of the decade-long Creative Industries Sector Plan. The latter was released alongside a broader Industrial Strategy designed to “make the UK the best place to do business.”
Source: UK Gov Unveils $500M Creative Industries Sector Plan Investment
Do U.S. copyright terminations extend to international markets? The Society of Composers & Lyricists and the Songwriters Guild of America believe so, and they’re weighing in on a high-stakes case revolving around the important question. The mentioned organizations (and a few others operating outside the music space) explained their position in an amicus brief supporting “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” songwriter Cyril Vetter.
Source: Songwriters Guild of America Files Copyright Recapture Case Brief
A new study by scholars from MIT and Wellesley, titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” set up a months-long comparative experiment that measured the brains and essays of some student writers, and found that AI users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Not only that, but the negative effects of using AI remained measurable in the participants afterwards, and even when they were doing their thinking without LLMs.
Source: Meta’s AI Model ‘Memorized’ Huge Chunks of Books, Including ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘1984’
The latest salvo came in early April, when user nyuuzyou scraped 12.6 million fanfics from the online repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) and uploaded the dataset to Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI models and software. Nyuuzyou’s upload was quickly discovered by the Reddit community r/AO3, where hundreds of users posted furious reactionsFanfic writers flooded the comment section of the dataset on Hugging Face, getting into arguments with AI defenders.
With no way to stop the onslaught of AI music, the industry is taking a different approach: figuring out how to make money off of it. Detection systems are being embedded across the entire music pipeline: in the tools used to train models, the platforms where songs are uploaded, the databases that license rights, and the algorithms that shape discovery. The goal isn’t just to catch synthetic content after the fact. It’s to identify it early, tag it with metadata, and govern how it moves through the system.
Source: The music industry is building the tech to hunt down AI songs
Suno and Udio have been slapped with another round of copyright litigation, this time by country musician Tony Justice, who filed class-action lawsuits against both controversial AI music generators. The complaints allege Suno and Udio used Justice’s recordings and works from “thousands of class members” without authorization to train their AI models.
Source: Suno and Udio hit with class action lawsuits from independent artist
In its newly released Industry Insights 2024 report, the United Kingdom’s Publishers Association has announced that, “Audiobooks and fiction drove publishing growth in 2024. “Audiobook revenue was £268 million (US$361.2 million)—a record high that’s 31 percent above the same figure in 2023.” In fact, digital formats are reported to have been “a key driver of growth with increased revenue across all three sectors—academic, educational, and consumer.”
Source: UK Publishers Association: 2024 Audiobooks Up 31 Percent
One way Deezer is addressing this influx of AI-generated content is by introducing what it claims to be “the world’s first” AI tagging system for music streaming. Deezer launched an AI detection tool in January after filing two patent applications for the technology in December. The company says that this tool can detect 100% AI-generated music from the “most prolific generative models” such as Suno and Udio.
Two U.S. senators have requested that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate Spotify due to allegations that the company bundled its music streaming and audiobook services into a more expensive subscription without obtaining user consent, while also reducing royalty payments to creators in the process.
Source: Senators urge FTC to investigate Spotify’s higher-priced bundled subscription | TechCrunch