Could AI Music Be One Step Closer To Being Legal?

Record labels are seemingly looking to AI companies when it comes to music.

Bloomberg reports that Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment are allegedly in talks to license music to AI firms. They’re allegedly looking to receive a small amount of equity in artificial intelligence start-up companies, Udio and Suno—two companies among many that use generative AI to help make music.

• New Study Predicts Music Creators' Revenue To Drop 24% By 2028 Due To Generative AI

The news comes after the three music majors sued Udio and Suno last year, accusing the companies of copyright infringement. The RIAA—Recording Industry Association of America—sought $150,000 per piece of work that was infringed.

According to their websites, the AI companies reportedly assist creatives in making music by allowing them to type in prompts about genre (country, rock, pop, hip-hop, etc.) and theme (unrequited love, loss, happiness, etc.). The users then receive audio recordings from software trained on datasets from millions of pieces of information, such as already recorded music.

Bloomberg reports that Udio, Suno, Universal, Warner, and Sony are attempting to agree on terms rather than continue fighting in court. This begs the question: Which record company will team up with AI firms first?

The news comes as Radiohead singer and solo artist Thom Yorke recently described AI music as “theft.”

In a new interview with Electronic Sound magazine, Yorke said of the relationship between artificial intelligence and music, “It analyses and steals and builds iterations without acknowledging the original human work it analysed. It creates pallid facsimiles, which is useful in the same way auto-accompaniment is useful, or a screensaver of a beautiful natural landscape in a billionaire’s bunker is.”

He continued, “But the economic structure is morally wrong … the human work used by AI to fake its creativity is not being acknowledged. Writers are not paid. It’s a weird kind of wanky, tech-bro nightmare future, and it seems this is what the tech industry does best.

“A devaluing of the rest of humanity, other than themselves, hidden behind tech… We are, in modern parlance, ‘creatives,’ which is a term I find deeply offensive because it arrived around the time that art morphed into ‘content’ for devices.”

AI has become a hot source of controversy in the global music industry, with as many artists wholly embracing it as there are artists slamming its use. Artists like James Blunt and Jordan Merrick have argued against AI, while Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, and IDLES have already utilised it in their campaigns.

Two companies fully invested in AI are Spotify and TikTok: the former uses generative AI for its DJ, Daylist, and Song Psychic tools, while the latter is beta testing a function that allows content creators to generate entire songs with AI (however, early examples have proved that to be rather catastrophic). In 2023, a study found that 59 per cent of young Australians feel comfortable with the prospect of AI-generated music.