The New Yorker: "Inside the Music Industry's High-Stakes A.I. Experiments"

Reid Rosefelt said:

An intriguing article in the New Yorker, centering on Lucian Grainge, Chairman of UMG:

Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments

Lucian Grainge, the chairman of UMG, has helped record labels rake in billions of dollars from streaming. Can he do the same with generative artificial intelligence?

www.newyorker.com

An excerpt:

Don Was told me about his session with Lyria. He prompted the model with the name of a famous artist, a legendary singer-songwriter he had worked with in the past, asking for a song about his first car. The DeepMind team suggested adding the command “produced by Don Was.” The A.I. generated four different fragments of songs about cars, all with lyrics, melodies, and orchestration, and sung in the A.I.-generated voice of the artist, which had been learned from YouTube videos. Was described the experience as “a combination of awe and terror simultaneously.” His first thought was “This is better than anything I could have done.” His second was “I could collaborate with myself on my very best day.” For that reason, he told himself, “the songwriters are going to like this more than anybody, as long as you can’t steal from them.” He imagines an A.I. that has been trained on an artist’s complete works, and which other songwriters could collaborate with, for a fee. The songwriter, he mused, “gets paid, and he can put his name on the song if he likes it, take it off if he doesn’t.”

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I'd be extremely shocked if it worked anywhere near that well (yet, that is... I do expect it will probably happen eventually). Unless they mean "better than anything I could have done in 30 seconds (unless I was really really inspired... and manic)"

Not surprising, the tech has been moving quickly as there is a lot of potential money to be made for the developers (artists not so much)

DeepMind are... they are going to win at this.

Very interesting Reid. I did get to the end and thought “but actually is UMG doing about AI generated music?” I suppose it’s still a work in progress.

Intrigued by this Google “artist incubator”. I hadn’t heard about it - was it public knowledge?

DoubleTap said:

Very interesting Reid. I did get to the end and thought “but actually is UMG doing about AI generated music?” I suppose it’s still a work in progress.

Intrigued by this Google “artist incubator”. I hadn’t heard about it - was it public knowledge?

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Yes, I agree. There is no definite answer yet to how it all will pan out. But I think that writer John Seabrook hinged the story on UMG head Lucian Grainge for a reason. Reading beneath the lines of this piece is the feeling that the profits from AI will eventually land in the pockets of mega-billion dollar international corporations. While there are small-time players who are trying to find equitable "opt out" solutions for ordinary musicians, AI is likely to be harnessed by the powerful. People like us will get our fair share of a millionth of a penny. The rules will be shaped to the advantage of the owners of IP.

But the story is yet to be told, and it is too soon to know how all this will playo out. There is another interesting article from the New Yorker, "Is A.I. the Death of I.P." which comes at the topic from another angle.


In my opinion, AI will be devastating to musicians whose entire business model is on copying others. Or at least working within the boundaries of what is currently very popular. AI will do that much better and it may put many of them out of business. But AI will never be able to affect the kind of people who devote themselves to doing something that hasn't been done before. Databases can only steal from the past. They can't deploy their algorithms on music or words or anything that hasn't been created yet. Stuff that breaks the mold. But that kind of person is rare.

This seems relevant: