Online music services call for stopping AI from 'stealing' song melodies

UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has grown increasingly concerned about AI bots using songs it holds the copyright to to train and create music similar to that of celebrities.

music services call stop who rate song interpretation picture 1 — Photo: IH

A person familiar with the matter said AI-generated songs have appeared on streaming services and UMG has filed a request to have them removed. The company is asking music streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogs to those using the songs to train AI technology.

“We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists,” UMG wrote in a letter to online platforms in March.

“The next generation of technology is raising important questions,” said a source familiar with the matter. “Most creative AI is trained on popular music. You’ll be able to ask AI to compose a song with lyrics like Taylor Swift, but the vocals are like Bruno Mars, and the theme is like Harry Styles. But the output is based on the artist’s work.”

PluggingAI’s YouTube page features uploaded tracks that sound like Kanye West singing songs by The Weeknd or SZA. The drayk.it website allows users to enter lyrics and get back a clip that sounds like a custom Drake song.

The most recent major advancement in this area is MusicLM, developed by Google, which can generate music from any text description. According to a research paper, MusicLM was trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music listening.

But Google did not release the product after its researchers found “a risk of creative content misappropriation.” The researchers found that about 1% of the music it generated was a direct copy of copyrighted work, and concluded that more work needed to be done to “address these risks” before releasing MusicLM.

UMG, home to artists including Taylor Swift, Elton John and The Weeknd, has been working to remove AI-generated songs. “We have learned that certain AI systems may have been trained on copyrighted content without obtaining the necessary consent from or compensation to the rights holders who own or produce that content,” UMG said.

“We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to prevent unauthorized use of their music and to prevent platforms from infringing on the rights of artists and other creators. We expect our platform partners to take steps to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists,” the UMG spokesperson added.

Hoang Ton (according to FT)

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