Sony Music, the music writer behind chart-topping musicians like Beyoncé, Harry Types and Doja Cat, is making it clear that tech corporations aren’t allowed to coach AI fashions utilizing its music — days after two main corporations introduced new AI.
Beyoncé accepts the Innovator Award on the 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards. (Photograph by Michael Buckner/Billboard through Getty Photographs)
In a letter seen by Bloomberg, NBC Information and BBC, Sony Music requested greater than 700 corporations to reveal in the event that they used its songs to coach AI and the way they did so. Sony Music needs to know if these corporations used even a snippet of a tune in its catalog with out permission.
The letter is Sony Music’s try to guard mental property, together with the album cowl artwork and the lyrics inside every tune.
The letter states that utilizing the corporate’s music with out permission implies that it and its artists weren’t compensated and even conscious that their work was being utilized in AI.
Mental property has been a central situation throughout industries as AI takes middle stage.
Associated: Billie Eilish, Elvis Costello, Jon Bon Jovi, and Extra Artists Rip Into ‘Predatory’ and ‘Catastrophic’ Use of AI within the Music Business
Final month, greater than 200 musicians and songwriters, together with Billie Eilish and Katy Perry, signed a letter calling out “a number of the largest and strongest corporations” for utilizing their work to coach AI fashions with out permission.
Tech corporations have concurrently made notable leaps in music AI. Google introduced on Tuesday that it could supply musicians a bunch of AI instruments designed particularly for them, and OpenAI’s Sora created its first music video two weeks in the past.
Each corporations haven’t publicly revealed the precise knowledge sources that went into their AI fashions.
Associated: OpenAI Reportedly Used Extra Than a Million Hours of YouTube Movies to Prepare Its Newest AI Mannequin
Sony Music has managed to develop income at the same time as AI inches on the stage. On Tuesday, Sony reported that Sony Music’s income was $11.05 billion within the fiscal yr that ended on March 31 — a 16.9% enhance from the earlier yr. The corporate attributed the expansion to larger income from streaming subscriptions like Spotify.
Within the last quarter of 2023, Sony Music’s largest initiatives had been SZA’s SOS, Travis Scott’s UTOPIA, and Rod Wave’s Nostalgia. These three albums generated essentially the most world income for the corporate in that quarter.
