AI Music Generators: Threat To The Music Industry
AI music generators that can instantly produce brand-new music songs are beginning to threaten the livelihoods of musicians. As a result, lobbyist groups appear to be competing for a dominant role in the content generation sector, which has them quite worried.
Music-generating app Mubert AI which can convert limited text inputs into a plausible-sounding composition:
“We’ve made it easier than ever for content creators of all kinds to license custom, high-quality, royalty-free music. From streamers to filmmakers to app builders.”
Naturally, computer-generated music has been around for a while, using different types of AI to produce outcomes that may sound both manmade and alien.
However, this new breed of music generators, pioneered by Mubert AI and Google’s Audio LM, feels like a whole other animal. They are more like creative replacements for musicians themselves than they are like creative integrations for the music-making process, negating the need to pay for expensive royalties or labor-intensive labor completely.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is concerned that AI-driven music generators may endanger both the financial security and legal rights of human musicians. The RIAA released a statement approving the usage of AI music generators in response to a request for feedback from the Office of the US Trade Representative.
Online services that use Artificial Intelligent to “extract, or rather, copy, the vocals, instrumentals, or some portion of the instrumentals (a music stem) from a sound recording” to “generate, master or remix a recording to be very similar to or almost as good as reference tracks by select, well-known sound recording artists” are infringing on its members’ “rights by making unauthorized copies of our member’s works,” the RIAA stated in a new statement to the Office of the US Trade Representative.
The RIAA included a variety of services, from those that master songs in the manner of well-known musicians to those that isolate voices from backing recordings. The remark may indicate that AI music generators are the trade organization’s next target because it has a lengthy history of litigating copyright infringement and combating music piracy, as Vice notes.
There isn’t much legal precedence, therefore it’s unclear if these AI-generated tunes genuinely violate the rights of musicians. It’s an intriguing look into the near future that raises many concerns, such as whether these technologies are just democratizing access to potent art production tools or whether they are actually stealing from the original artists who served as their inspiration.
The production of synthetic content makes it simpler for many artists to keep up in this content-driven environment. But it’s always worth considering what, if anything, is lost when we transition to a new, AI-driven world.
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