Music generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a problem for the industry. That is what Universal Music Group (UMG) says, one of the three largest record companies in the world, which has urged streaming music platforms such as Apple Music or Spotify to block the training of AI models, because it would be violating the rights of author of the songs they use.
The record label considers that certain AI systems "could have been trained with content protected by copyright" without obtaining the necessary consents and without paying financial compensation to the creators of said works.
"A lot of the generative AI is trained on popular music. You could say: I want to write a song with Taylor Swift-like lyrics, Bruno Mars-esque vocals, and something that looks like a Harry Styles song. The result I you get is because the AI has been trained on the intellectual property of those artists," explains a source related to the Financial Times.
According to several emails to which the Financial Times has had access, Universal Music Group warns that it will not hesitate to "take measures" to protect the rights of its artists. For this reason, they urge streaming music platforms such as Apple Music or Spotify to block generative AI developers from accessing their music catalogues.
Nor do they rule out taking legal action against any company that does not respect the copyrights of artists such as Taylor Swift, Katy Perry or Bad Gyal, among others.
Generative artificial intelligence is also advancing in the music industry. Google already has a service called MusicLM, which generates music from text. This model is trained with a data set of 280,000 hours of music and that, for the moment, the company has not released due to a "risk of possible misappropriation of creative content," they recall from this medium.
The results are spectacular, say its developers: “Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and in adherence to text description. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it can be conditioned on both text and melody, as it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption.”
This technology creates music without the need for an artist to be involved. You just have to enter a short description of what you want and the AI will do the rest. For example, he has been able to create "a fusion of reggaeton and electronic dance music, with a spacey, otherworldly sound."
Open AI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT and Dall-E, has also developed Jukebox, another system capable of generating music from scratch simply by entering a genre, artist and lyrics.
It is not the first time that artists have shown concern about the possibilities of generative artificial intelligence. Last January a group of creators sued three companies dedicated to digital art (Stability AI, DeviantArt and Midjourney) for infringing copyright in the development of artistic works created by AI.
Getty Images, one of the world's largest agencies, has also taken legal action in London's High Court of Justice against Stability AI, alleging that the company infringed intellectual property rights, including copyright in content it owns or represents the imaging agency.
