This story is an update to our previous feature “Universal Warns AI is Ripping Off Copyrighted Music
By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
First it was artists who were panicking over the rise of AI, and now it’s musicians and music publishers.
AI-produced music and music videos that imitate superstars like Drake and The Weeknd have the music industry in an uproar.
Universal Music Group has already taken action, warning music streamers like Spotify and Apple Music to block AI systems from ‘scraping’ copyrighted songs. UMG says generative AI systems are violating copyright by using copyrighted music to train their systems, which then create highly realistic new works based on the artists’ music libraries.
The example that has everyone in an AI frenzy were produced by a mysterious producer named ‘Ghostwriter’ (seen in photo at top) who has crafted a number of tracks, including one called Heart on My Sleeve, which is already blowing up on both Spotify and TikTok. The track has already gained 10 million views on TikTok with a song that blends the vocal styles of both Drake and The Weeknd.
In response, UMG is insisting that streamers such as Spotify or YouTube pull down any AI-generated music that may violate their copyright, setting the scene for a titanic battle over traditional intellectual property rights and the generative abilities of AI programs.
A search on YouTube showed the video streamer did indeed pull the videos, but new versions continue to pop up from other YouTube contributors. For example, one contributor named Devil’s Tone reposted the song on April 19 with a short note saying, “They took down the other video.”
The video is linked below, but it may be gone by the time you click it!
The song was also pulled down on Spotify, but many fans appeared to be siding with the AI and not with the musicians or UMG.
“So mad this was taken down from Spotify,” said one fan, while another added, “They never claimed it was Drake or Weeknd, so no copyright issue. The record labels have too much power.”
According to Variety, Heart On My Sleeve was racking up enough listeners by Monday, April 17 that it was on track to become a charting song, but streamers began pulling the song later that day, including Tidal, Apple and Spotify. YouTube was the last to yank the track, with a message reading, “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Universal Music Group.”
The issue now is that enough contributors were able to download the track that it can be easily reposted on many different accounts, creating a very difficult game of legal Whac-A-Mole for the music industry. A search on YouTube on April 20 showed dozens of contributors had posted the song, although some included reaction to the issue around AI generated music.
Even worse, Heart On My Sleeve is far from the only song being generated using the voices of Drake, The Weeknd, and literally dozens of other artists. For example, one producer used AI to create a version of the Colbie Caillat song ‘Bubbly’ ostensibly sung by Drake, and Drake himself reacted angrily to an AI version of him rapping to Ice Spice’s sexually explicit song ‘Munch’, as he wrote a post on Instagram saying “This is the final straw, AI.”
The growing threat to music copyright has UMG warning they will go to war over any suspected violations of their artists’ intellectual property. “We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators,” a rep for UMG said. “We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists.”
Analysis: US Government Defines Copyright Protection for AI-Created Works
Our original story from April 17, 2023 continues below.
Universal Warns AI is Ripping Off Copyrighted Music
Universal Music Group is warning Spotify and Apple Music to block AI systems from scraping copyrighted songs.
In a story broken by the Financial Times, UMG executives revealed the companies’ concerns over AI programs that are being trained on music scraped from popular music systems. The Times also reviewed emails sent by the company to the streaming services. The paper quoted one email from UMG that warned the streaming services, “We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists.”
Universal has a major stake in the outcome of this debate, as it controls roughly one-third of the global music market. Already, UMG is issuing take-down notices for AI-generated songs that are popping up on streaming services. However, that process is slow and unwieldy, and doesn’t deal with the more urgent issue that individuals with no musical background can produce songs that are based on works produced by professional musicians.
This is also just the latest in a series of issues posed by artificial intelligence for the overall licensing industry, which includes film, TV, art, graphic design, books and graphic novels, and now music.
Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.
UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists.
Opinion: Artists Are Freaking Out Over AI Apps, And So Should You
AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology. The Financial Times interviewed executives who are dealing with the issue, but kept their names out of the story.
“This next generation of technology poses significant issues,” said a person close to the situation. “Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say: compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists’ intellectual property.”
Some of those songs are so similar to the originals, that even fans can be fooled. UMG executives pointed to a YouTube page called “PluggingAI”, where there are tracks uploaded that sound like Kanye West singing songs by The Weeknd or SZA. The website drayk.it allowed users to enter a prompt and receive a clip that sounded like a custom Drake song. The site was shut down a few months ago, but literally anyone with a MusicLM account could do the same thing.
There are a number of AI programs that can reproduce or create ‘new’ music derived from original works, but the one raising the most concern right now is MusicLM, developed by Google, which will generate music from a simple text description. At the moment, MusicLM remains a research project from Google, but it’s worth noting that, according to the company’s research paper, Music LM was trained on a data set of 280,000 hours of music.
The researchers presented MusicLM in the following way: “We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as “a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff”. MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes.
“Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts.”
Among the examples given was an audio recording of a reggae song that MusicLM created from this text prompt: “Slow tempo, bass-and-drums-led reggae song. Sustained electric guitar. High-pitched bongos with ringing tones. Vocals are relaxed with a laid-back feel, very expressive.” You can hear the result on THIS PAGE.
According to the Financial Times, Google has not yet released MusicLM to the public, after its researchers found a “risk of potential misappropriation of creative content”.
“The researchers found that about 1 per cent of the music it generated was a direct replica of copyrighted work and concluded that more work is needed to “tackle these risks” before releasing MusicLM,” the Times reported.
Neither Spotify nor Apple Music were quoted in the Financial Times report.
Why You Need to Watch the Getty Images Lawsuit Against Stability AI
Analysis: US Government Defines Copyright Protection for AI-Created Works