![]() Clearly, the personal partner of a world-famous multibillionaire can experiment with payment structures in a way most musicians can’t. Just where in this framework you’d put Grimes, whose new Elf.Tech invites users to take her recorded vocals to use in AI-generated songs (splitting DSP royalties with her), is beyond me. The other is composed of first-movers: smaller, independent gamblers who move swiftly as they build things solely for consumers. Two opposing groups tend to form at the dawn of a revolutionary technology: One is the monolithic entities at the top of the food chain, who fight the new challenge to their dominance. Add algorithmic curation that reproduces winning formulae endlessly and exponentially and it’s easy to imagine a flood of homogenous content that drowns out and impoverishes diverse and less-known artists-or what we might call music’s Future. Music isn’t made of algorithms it’s made of touch, gesture, feelings, and experiences of people who create their work in time-what we call “authenticity.” By mimicking these things, increasingly well at unbelievable speeds, AI-generated music risks degrading these core qualities, populating a world with infinite variations of finite sources that erode their emotional resonance. … It’s hard to overstate how much this is likely to change music and, potentially, us. ![]() ![]() This figure is almost certainly an underestimate, and, crucially, it was given before AI agents began flooding distributors with millions of soundalike tracks, each stamped out in minutes. Spotify admitted to pulling 750k fraudulent tracksĪ little over a year ago, a Spotify exec admitted that the platform had to pull down “some 750,000” songs that they’d discovered were streaming fraudulently. And AI, to say the least, is all about scale. These minor acts of creative piracy become something else when they start to scale. Instead of merely locating the disconnected music, we’d have to determine which of the ten or more deep-fake versions was the actual copyrighted work. Inevitably, some bad actor would slightly morph or mask the fingerprints of a protected track in order to sell or share it themselves, and make our job much harder. As this reality sank in, I began a path toward founding a copyrights management company, one that protects the royalties of creators whose works are globally streaming with tools equal to the task: cutting-edge scalable AI technology, similar to ChatGPT, that can penetrate the massive global database of a Spotify or Youtube and find lost royalties like so many needles in a million haystacks. In 2008, I was among countless creators whose sounds, music, and videos were appearing on major networks and platforms like YouTube without getting a dime of the royalties many of us need to survive. And these properties are already being drastically redefined, as the disruption of AI makes the early-’00s arrival of Napster seem like a hiccup. But I also speak as a lifelong investor in quality of vision, craftsmanship, performance, soul. When I talk to creators today, I talk partly as a creator with a guitar on my lap, writing and recording music, and partly as a tech founder whose company manages millions of creators’ copyrights worldwide. For what it’s worth, I’m human, and, like anyone whose music career began before the early ‘00s, I have a bone-deep knowledge of what “pre-digital“ vs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |