What Happens When Artists Give Their Consent?
The latest agreements will determine how fans can use artists’ music in AI-generated content when given explicit permission.
Warner Music, which manages the catalogs of stars like Madonna, Bruno Mars, and Neil Young, has struck a deal with Suno that allows the service to incorporate specific artists’ work if they opt in. A prompt like “Madonna-style birthday song for my wife” might be more enticing than a generic “‘80s synth-pop song,” but it remains unclear which artists have or will opt in.
What Can You Do With Your AI-Created Track?
The industry is still debating whether users should be able to download their AI-generated tracks and upload them anywhere, or if they should be confined to the “walled gardens” of the platforms that produced them.
Is the AI Music World Rife with Scams?
While there are many legitimate uses of AI by real musicians and curious amateurs, scams and fraud are a significant problem.
Deezer, a French streaming service, recently reported that about 90,000 AI-generated tracks are uploaded to its platform daily, most of them low-quality content that fails to attract listeners.
Of the relatively small number that do receive clicks, Deezer says that as many as 85 percent are fraudulent. The scammers’ method is straightforward: create AI songs, then deploy armies of bots to click on them, generating illicit royalties. Because streaming platforms pay proportionate fees to content providers, every payment to fake creators reduces the pool available for real artists.
Catching these fraudsters has become a constant cat-and-mouse game.
Recently, music industry groups, including the Grammys, have called for a labeling system to identify music made with generative AI.
What Do Artists Think?
Views are far from unified. Some, like star producer Timbaland and performer Grimes, have welcomed the technology and signaled a willingness to experiment.
Timbaland recently introduced a virtual artist named TaTa Taktumi, whose vocals on the song “Glitch x Pulse” were partly generated by AI software, though humans created 80 to 85 percent of the track, Timbaland said in an interview with The New York Times:
