Google is signaling that it will pay off the music industry with special deals that create brand-new — and potentially devastating! — private intellectual property rights, while basically telling the rest of the web that the price of being indexed in Search is complete capitulation to allowing Google to scrape data for AI training.
Source: Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright
Here’s the thing, at the end of the day, the average music consumer–not everybody, you’ll still have your audiophiles and the sort of farm-to-table music people–but the average listener, they just don’t care how music is made. All they care about is the consumptive value of music. So if it slaps, it fucking slaps.
Source: Breaking Down The Future of Music and AI with Lawyer Ash Kernen
The Independent Society of Musicians has published its sixth report on the impact Brexit has had on musicians in the UK. Based on canvassing more than 400 musicians and music industry professionals, it paints a stark picture of “an enormously damaging effect on [British] musicians’ ability to work in Europe”.
Source: ‘Paying the Price’ report outlines Brexit impact on musicians – Music Ally
Apple is introducing several new features for podcast creators on its platform to rival Spotify’s dominance of a format Apple started. One of the biggest new features is the ability for creators to see subscription analytics in the Apple Podcasts Connect platform. Apple is also partnering with Linkfire to give creators a new way to generate smart links for landing pages.
Source: Apple Remembers It Started Podcasts—Introduces New Tools
MidJourney, a prominent generative AI image creation tool with an annual subscription cost of around $100, has announced the release of its latest feature. Called “Vary (Region),” this new addition allows users to engage in inpainting—a process that edits elements within an image’s canvas. The Vary feature gives users the ability to select specific portions of an image and modify them using text prompts.
Source: MidJourney Adds Image Inpainting—Game Changer or Catch-Up Play? – Decrypt
DICE, which claims to be “the world’s largest independent music ticketing platform”, says that “millions of fans” use its platform to discover and attend live events. The company reports that over 55,000 artists and 10,000+ venues, festivals and promoters will use DICE to sell their tickets across 30 cities this year. The app locks tickets to ticketholders’ smartphones.
Source: DICE raises $65m from investors including Matt Pincus, Willard Ahdritz and more
As TikTok continues to seek a truce with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the general public is getting a rare look into the negotiations. Forbes has obtained a draft of TikTok’s CFIUS agreement, and if the details of that document are accurate, the pact would give the U.S. government unprecedented influence over TikTok’s data, policies, and operations.
TikTok competitor Triller is preparing to go public, but estimates from Apptopia call its self-reported user numbers into question. Per Triller’s S-1 filing, the short-form video app has had 550 million lifetime sign-ups. But market intelligence firm Apptopia estimates that Triller has been downloaded just 73.2 million times since launch in 2015 — that’s 87% lower than Triller’s own reports.
According to BeatStars, the new “Seeds” tool is aimed at helping creators generate initial ideas, or “plant seeds” for their tracks. It builds on the technology introduced by Lemonaide, which claims that its AI is trained “exclusively on voluntarily contributed data from producers” to generate millions of different combinations.
Source: After partnering with AI music startup Lemonaide, BeatStars unveils AI music creation tool, ‘Seeds’
Hollywood’s quiet AI hiring spree, first reported by the Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times, is not necessarily tied directly to AI-generated scripts or actors’ likenesses, nor are all the positions related to generative AI, the subject of much ethical debate and concern. But taken together, the push to expand AI employment indicates an industry-wide arms race to build up companies’ machine learning capabilities, cutting across many aspects of the business.
Source: ‘Embrace it or risk obsolescence’: how will AI jobs affect Hollywood?