Text | Music Herald, Author | Li Qinyu, Editor | Fan Zhihui On June 28, the AI:OK project funded by the Irish government and initiated by Dublin City University in Ireland was officially launched, dedicated to promoting the responsible use of artificial intelligence in the music

text | Music Herald, author | Li Qinyu, editor | Fan Zhihui

Just a few days ago, multiple record companies, including Sony Music, Universal Music, and Warner Music, jointly filed a lawsuit against two emerging AI music companies, Suno and Audio.

According to The Verge, the lawsuit was filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents record companies. accused suno of infringing 662 songs and audio of 1,670 infringing songs, and made a maximum claim of 15 for each work. Ten thousand US dollars is required, which is also the maximum amount of compensation for intentional infringement stipulated in the US Copyright Act.

riaa chief legal officer Ken Doroshow said: "Suno and Audio are trying to cover up their infringements in all aspects, instead of putting their services on a sound and legal basis."

One month after Sony Music's "withdrawal" incident, the music industry finally Ushering in a head-to-head confrontation between record companies and AI companies. Although the three major records of

"encirclement and suppression" suno, audio

suno and audio are just emerging aigc products, most creators are familiar with them.

In May this year, suno announced the completion of a new round of financing, amounting to US$125 million, breaking the largest music technology financing since March 2021 and the largest round of financing in the music/audio AI field so far.

In April this year, audio ended its internal testing and was officially released, receiving US$10 million in seed round financing. Its investor lineup is gorgeous, including support from a16z Cultural Leadership Fund, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Google Gemini AL head Oriol Vinyal, music distribution platform unitedmasters, pop singers will.i.am, common and music producers Tay Keith and Kevin Wall, the producer of Live Earth and Live 8, are also investors.

riaa provided a large amount of evidence in the lawsuit materials, including examples of music generated using suno and audio, and comparisons of their scores with existing copyrighted works.

For example, if you input a string of prompt words to suno, "rock music of the 1950s, blues 12 bars, energetic male rock singer, guitar master", the generated audio file will almost completely copy the signature melody of representatives of the genre such as B.B. King and Chuck Berry. .

It can be seen from the evidence materials that classic old songs such as "Johnny B. Goode" and "The Thrill is Gone" have been almost wiped out by the 35 files generated by suno.

udio is not much better. Complaint materials indicate that its artificially generated songs appear to have copied bublé’s “Sway.”

Interestingly, riaa did not accuse these "colliding melody" and "colliding lyrics" tracks of copyright infringement, but sued the artificial intelligence company for using copyrighted music as part of its training data.

Not only that, but complaints against suno claim that some of its generated productions actually include producer tag watermarks, those brief sounds that producers add to the beginning or end of a track. Mikey Shulman, CEO of

suno, said in an emailed statement that the company's technology is "transformative" and designed to generate entirely new output rather than remember and repeat existing content. This is why suno does not allow users to prompt for specific artists. (However, according to reports, users can actually bypass this restriction.)

He also mentioned: "We would be happy to explain this to the record companies who filed the lawsuit, and we have tried to do so, but they have not engaged with us. A sincere discussion, but a return to the old routine dominated by lawyers.”

In 2023 alone, an estimated 170 million songs will be created using artificial intelligence and uploaded to music streaming platforms such as Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music.

It is understood that the entire AI music generation tool industry has experienced significant growth this year, with an average growth rate of nearly 30%. Among them, and suno maintained a growth rate of 38.04% in April this year, reaching 31.76 million visits, and the number of users has exceeded 10 million; audio announced in May that 10 songs will be generated every second on the platform, and with the dynamics of vocals and musical instruments The generation effect has attracted many music players.

The two AI companies have just entered the music industry and caused a splash. No wonder they attracted the attention of the three "big brothers".

As the scale of accusations against companies that master the core technology of AI generation gradually increases, silicon-based art and carbon-based music each unite and raise their flags, and a war is about to break out. But what is certain is that this tug-of-war has just begun and is far from reaching the finals in the true sense.

False encirclement and suppression, real game

Before riaa filed a lawsuit against suno and audio, the United States had launched multiple lawsuits against artificial intelligence developers in the past year.

For example, in October last year, a lawsuit was filed with Universal Music, Concord and Abkco as plaintiffs. The plaintiffs claimed that Anthropic AI’s chatbot Claude had been plagiarizing copyrighted lyrics. The

plaintiffs believe that “when such artificial intelligence music services use copyrighted audio materials without authorization, synthetic music generated by these technologies may flood the market. These machine-generated music will directly compete with real-life musical works, resulting in Its market price has dropped, eventually submerging real musical works."

Many technology companies involved in developing artificial intelligence technology, including Anthropic and Google, believe that using copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence should be treated as such. There is a "fair use" exemption from copyright law, which means that the use of copyrighted material should be allowed in certain circumstances, such as developing new technologies or products.

According to Jonathan Coote, a music and artificial intelligence lawyer at the British law firm Bray & Krais, "fair use" in the United States is much more flexible than in the United Kingdom, and includes considerations such as whether the use is "transformative." He added: "This may become a philosophical question about the creative role of artificial intelligence, including its economic and social impact. These cases may be one of many in the creative industry that will ultimately be decided by a Supreme Court ruling."

Of course, For technology companies with technology as their core, establishing their products and business models is often more important than anything else. Therefore, before AIGC products formed a "regular army", the copyright issue that was ignored in order to verify the agile development of the model became an inevitable flaw and was criticized.

This is especially true for music, images, and film and television AI, especially music AIGC products. Training models requires a large amount of music materials. In the startup stage of a company, it is almost impossible to obtain copyright licenses one by one. Copyright parties often do not pay enough attention to the AI ​​company before it grows.

Popular music or music of a specific genre often have similarities in melody trends and chord compositions. This makes the AI ​​music generated by training with massive music libraries easier to give people a "crowded" feeling, and is easier for listeners to compare and retain. Evidence of its “electronic plagiarism”. As the AI ​​company gradually develops and grows, listeners can also use this to attack or question its copyright issues in a targeted manner.

Although AI companies have been criticized for infringement and lawsuits from copyright owners, it does not mean that music record companies cannot avoid AI technology.

A week before launching the infringement lawsuit, Universal Music has just announced a new strategic partnership with AI company soundlabs. Artists and producers under Universal Music will be able to use soundlabs' artificial intelligence sound plug-in micdrop, and artists can provide data to generate their own speech models and have full control over the use of these models.

On the other hand, there are currently solutions being discussed in the music industry. For example, on June 26, YouTube, a video platform owned by Google, is trying to pay "one-time cash" to Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music in exchange for song authorization to legally train its artificial intelligence music tool (of course, Sony Music does not Not involved) .According to people familiar with the matter, YouTube hopes to provide a one-time cash payment to obtain the rights to a specific artist's music with the artist's permission.

Last year, YouTube established a partnership with the two giants Universal Music and Warner Music, trying to apply the new AI function Dream Track developed by the cooperation in YouTube short, and compete with TikTok in the short video field. But the recruitment results seemed to backfire, with only 10 artists agreeing to put their works into model training for its AI products.

From another perspective, this seems to be a signal sent by artists, that is, artists are more cautious about AI than record companies. While a handful of artists, such as grimes and 3lau, have embraced the technology, many more have expressed concerns about what it means for the future of human creativity.

It can be seen that record companies do not really want to "annihilate" AI, but use a game to increase their negotiating chips, protect the legitimate rights and interests of musicians, and thus maintain the foundation of their own revenue.

However, the opponent we encountered this time has taken over the content creation sector, which is at the core of the entire industry, making this roundabout overtaking even more threatening. If you are not careful, the Iron Throne of the music industry will completely change hands, and the music company And the creators had to step in early and be prepared.

Business war scripts always lead to the same end by different routes

It is obvious that the rapid development of AI has caused a "napster effect" similar to the "napster effect" on the music industry twenty years ago.

In June 1999, napster, as a revolutionary peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing platform, attracted a large number of users, especially college students and young people. In less than a year, the number of napster users surged to millions, making it the most popular platform on the Internet at that time. One of the most popular applications.

But the emergence of napster caused an unprecedented impact on record companies. Through Napster, pirated music spread rapidly, and people could easily obtain music resources through the Internet, resulting in a sharp decline in sales of tapes, CDs, and vinyl records.

It is understood that the revenue of the U.S. music industry reached its peak in 1999 and failed to return to this level in the next two decades. Revenue from physical music continued to decline, with sales each year being lower than the previous year. .

In 2000, riaa joined a number of major record companies to file a lawsuit against napster, accusing it of illegally distributing copyrighted music works in large quantities. Artists represented by dr. dre and record companies represented by emi expressed strong opposition to napster protest.

This legal battle marked a major conflict between the music industry and digital technology, and had a profound impact on subsequent copyright protection and the development of digital music.

After much entanglement, Napster was shut down in 2001. Bestaman, who provided financial support for it, paid tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI, and nmpa respectively from 2006 to 2007. No wait.

However, napster's p2p technology has become the technical basis for subsequent streaming services. In the early days of Spotify's development, p2p technology helped Spotify develop effective music playback software and effectively saved server bandwidth expenses. It was not until 2014 that spotify gradually abandoned p2p technology.

In the chaos of free and piracy, music streaming platforms such as Spotify and Tencent Music have also strategically cooperated with the three major record labels to obtain music authorization and win-win shares, jointly pushing the historical process into the streaming media era.

riaa has always only played high-end games. In the battle with napster, riaa won a great victory, and now it is not showing mercy when facing the more advanced opponent AI company.

Currently, the number of infringing tracks mentioned in this lawsuit are 662 and 1,679 respectively. According to the standard of up to US$150,000 per work, suno and audio will face hundreds of millions of dollars in claims. This is both a sky-high fee for startups, but more like a warning to all those who try to use unauthorized copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence product models. The

industry will not disappear due to the emergence of new technologies, it will only change the original rules of the game.Litigation cannot curb the rapid development of technology, and record companies and musicians will eventually have to reconcile with new technologies, but only if the rights of creators can be protected and a reasonable distribution plan can be created.

Conclusion

The birth of new technologies often brings about earth-shaking changes to any industrial structure, and no one in the industry can "survive".

For example, printing technology has reduced the production costs of the publishing industry. After going through the chaotic period of rampant piracy, e-books have also taken away a large share of the book market, while the new streaming media technology has subverted the original sales channels and accelerated The decline of traditional bookstores.

But at the same time, various publishing institutions, bookstores and practitioners are also embracing technology and formulating new profit sharing rules for new channels. The entire publishing industry is gradually exploring a new development path.

Perhaps in the near future, major copyright owners and songwriters will also form a new industrial structure with AI technology, but it is foreseeable that this process will not be a smooth road.

When AI technology sweeps in unstoppably, silicon-based life greedily sucks the blood of human wisdom and at the same time cooks a bigger and sweeter cake for the market. How to maximize a share of the pie is the existing vested interest in the music industry. Topics of greatest concern.