By Sabrina Lynch
- Meta and Universal Music Group have teamed up to guard artists’ interests from AI Intrusion
- 72% of top music producers admit to using AI tools
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms has partnered with Universal Music Group (UMG) to evolve commercial opportunities for its roster of songwriters and artists across Meta’s platforms, including Threads, Instagram, Horizon and Messenger. The deal looks to cement both companies’ commitment to protect the work of “human creators” being pillaged by AI to create unauthorized content – a move that strikes a chord with thousands of artists, composers and writers who have raised their major concerns over copyright infringements.
Why This Matters: Compensation is the name of the game. Artists are not being paid one cent for their vocal likeness and are furious about the lack of guardrails in place to protect their music bread & butter. Thousands of AI vocal programs are being developed by users from around the world who upload samples to social platforms under the guise of being new material from big-hitters such as Beyonce, the Weeknd or Rihanna. To add insult to injury, all the fake content is published without the artists’ consent. The extent of theft is so severe that a lawsuit was filed by the Recording Industry Association of America against music startups Udio and Suno who trained their AI models using copyrighted music. Sudo finally confessed to using copyrighted songs for its AI fakes but proclaimed fair use in the public domain.
Their position wasn’t helped by the actions of millionaire-status artists who were guilty of doing the same thing. Case in point, Drake and his camp used AI to bring Tupac back to life and produced a completely new, tech-faked verse delivered in the late rapper’s voice for Drake’s diss track against K Dot. The culture was not happy, and neither was Congress. Even with all these cases, numbers show that 72% of top music producers are using AI tools. So with the AI market projected to reach $184 billion this year and hit a 28.46% growth rate by 2030, this new agreement couldn’t have come at a more opportune time.
What’s Next: It’s going to take time to reign in AI usage without the safety net of legislation. A track whose music, vocals and artwork were entirely generated through AI is currently sitting in the top 50 charts in Germany. Whilst Meta wants to take a more ethical approach to AI music, only releasing generative AI tracks trained by its own composition or licensed music, other companies have yet to declare if they’ll fall in line. This is however a great move to tame predators and ensure artists are not only consulted for anything involving their work, but also compensated for its usage.
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