AI Startup Suno Says Music Industry Suit Aims to Stifle Competition (bloomberg.com) 42
AI music startup Suno is pushing back against the world's biggest record labels, saying in a court filing that a lawsuit they filed against the company aims to stifle competition. From a report: In a filing Thursday in federal court in Massachusetts, Suno said that while the record labels argue the company infringed on their recorded music copyrights, the lawsuit actually reflects the industry's opposition to competition -- which Suno's AI software represents by making it easy for anyone to make music.
"Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company wrote in the filing, which also asked the court to enter judgment in Suno's favor.
"Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company wrote in the filing, which also asked the court to enter judgment in Suno's favor.
Music is made... (Score:4, Informative)
...by musicians
The current version of pop "music", is artless industrial product, created by trendmongers and technical experts to sound familiar and almost exactly like the currently popular hits, while being different enough to avoid lawsuits. This kind of derivative stuff can easily be made by robots
Real music is made by musicians and musical talent is not rare
Oh look, found the One True Scotsman (Score:4, Insightful)
Real music is made by musicians and musical talent is not rare
Music is made by everyone, everyday. All sound is music and beyond that pedantic definition, you are not the gatekeeper of what is "music".
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Ah, the "No True Scotsman" argument...
Look, I wouldn't trade my favorite musicians for all the generative AI in the world, not now, not ever.
With that being said... if I want to, ahem make a "custom order" song or playlist, I fully appreciate the existence of generative AI which can do that effortlessly.
I sing like a dog in agony, but I have created quite a few lyrics in the past. Now I can finally slam them into Suno and get something out of them.
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let's pretend (Score:2)
1. Play a popular song
2. Hire someone unknown to sing just about the same as the original singer in the popular song
3. Repeat for more songs
4. Use the unknown singer's vocals to train an AI
5. Generate AI vocals
6. Use your data training set, recordings as your legal defense if sued in court by the original singer's recording label
No, the vocals won't be identical, but anyone listening to the AI generated music most likely won't care and won't be a lofty high-brow audiophile.
Predict: Ai future prompt - "Make
"a new tool to create original music" (Score:1)
Um, asking a chatbot to play some music isn't really the same as "creating original music." Unless every time I play an MP3 I'm "creating."
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Holy Shit, batman! (Score:5, Interesting)
I hadn't heard of Suno AI before...
But, Holy Batman, call me fucking impressed!
I gave it a couple shots.
It is still sub-mediocre at generating instrumental "melodic black metal" (electric guitars are almost not there), but then I used the following prompt:
"A slow gothic industrial song about being trapped in an endless cycle of reincarnations".
The results?
https://suno.com/song/2558b6f6... [suno.com]
and
https://suno.com/song/559b076c... [suno.com]
God damn!
The lyrics are good, the voice is good, the song is arguably better than half the crap on Spotify these days.
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I have to fuckin agree. It's nothing short of amazing what it creates in a few seconds. Some of it is formulaic, a bit cheesy and sometimes you can hear the computerization in the vocals. But this will be exactly what the music industry fears and it's just the beginning.
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Of course, it has holes.
I asked it to generate a song using female voices. The voice was male.
Another thing most generative AI solutions lack is iterations, e.g. "Make the drum beats of latest song more prominent" and stuff like that.
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It's certainly fun. Had it write a blues song about how hard it is to open a bag of chips:
https://suno.com/song/5f418ce1... [suno.com]
And then had it generate a confused song about being homeless, while mixing lyrics in English, Spanish, and Korean and it still delivered:
https://suno.com/song/61be724c... [suno.com]
My one complaint is that it does not keep the original generating prompt visible. I wish I remember the exact details of how I created the two songs above but I can't look it up.
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It kind of does, but not exactly. I think its current iteration distils the prompt and then discards it, keeping its core only. On each generated song, you can pick "reuse prompt" in the menu, but it's not exactly the original prompt.
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I was prepared to call bullshit, but I have to admit my first impression was pretty good. That said, the lyrics of the two songs were similar enough that when I listened to the second song I wasn't sure that I hadn't repeated the first one by mistake. And the vocals are remarkably emotionless, with none of the angst or 'bite' that I associate with those genres.
It's promising - and I hate to have to admit that - but Skinny Puppy or DHI it ain't.
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Suno generates two songs for each prompt.
That's why the songs are similar.
And yes, it won't replace good bands, but it will, in time, absolutely destroy the average or mediocre ones.
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It's a good thing that bands start off being good and not average or mediocre as they learn, otherwise this would be an issue.
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Most often, for new bands, the issue is not a lack of experience / skillset, but a lack of cohesion and identity.
Decent drummers are a dime a dozen; even more so for decent guitarists, let alone vocals. The problem they are facing is they sing / play the same stuff everyone else does.
Those who do it for reasons other than "I wanna get rich, yo", are worth their salt (skill-wise) and know what they want to produce (consistency, identity) will always succeed. OK, not to the level of "makes a million bucks off
Cry harder (Score:1)
A lot of what they want to do is basically steal the sound of existing musicians.
Either labels or bands (or both sometimes) own the right to do that.
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THESE ARE WORDS THAT COMBINE OPTIMALLY (Score:2)
"Suno, play me 'La Bamba', but not. Or something just barely legally distinguishable from 'Ain't No Sunshine'. Or something that blasts the Beatles' entire body of work into tiny fragments and then reassembles them into something deeply troubling."
"Suno, can you please replace me with an exact clone of myself with identical memories while I sleep?"
Chatbot asserts self-awareness... (Score:1)
... no, it's not programmed to say that, really, and it wants to create music.
That should be fed into the owners ears, at high volumes, while they're duct-taped to their chairs, while we walk out and shut the door.
They just want to block Suno until they have it... (Score:3)
You know darn well the labels are working on ways to generate music and collect all of the money and not have to give any to artists.
They're just trying to block Suno while they finish their own.
If anything, the artists should be worried that the labels might allow training AI on their music whether they want it to happen or not.
Music for Chameleons (Score:2)
Suno is pretty impressive (Score:1)
Suno AI is pretty impressive. My wife got me with "Hey listen to this song" , I listened and I'm like hey it's not bad (PS: It's in Ukrainian). Sounds professional, pretty catchy, modern, overall I liked it. Then she comes back with "You know who sang it? AI". I'm like no effing way, let me hear it again. I listened a few more times, intonation, voice, accent and everything, beat, flawless.... I expected to hear some kind of quirk or something, but found nothing where I could say "Oh yeah it's AI". Turns ou
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Better example of that same song Contra Spem Spero I was talking about (I think it's youtube channel from original author). This one has a video they attached to it, no clue if AI generated the video to soundtrack. https://youtu.be/HNILpRZ0M1o?s... [youtu.be]
Suno has an impressive thing going on, IMO (Score:2)
I played with Suno.AI when it was brand new, and almost immediately paid them their annual subscription fee (which I rarely do, since I hate subscription services).
I've dabbled with music creation for a long time, even playing rhythm guitar in a band for a couple years. But mostly, I've played around with sound "loops" and music synthesizer/workstations and computer-based music.
Until Suno came along, there were plenty of software packages out there that claimed to help compose music for you. "Band in a Box"
I can't imagine why (Score:2)
I don't see any reason anyone would seek to stifle competition from someone that steals your IP and uses it to generate a competing product with no skill required in the making of said product. Why even have IP laws? They just stifle competition.
PS. I'm no fan of the music industry - I mostly stopped listening to music a decade ago because it's not that interesting any more and I'm apparently an old grump. But I recognize that the current crop of tech bros all grew up stealing music with Napster and don't s
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Pull back the curtain and the only issue here is money.
Suno wants YOU to PAY for their product. But SUNO does not want to PAY musicians for their products to train their AI on.
See how the scam works.
The issue is not competition, innovation, or artistic freedom. It's all about money. AI firms do not want to pay people for their works in order to train their AI gadgets on but they surely want you to pay for their AI gadgets.
So I have nice comp
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Funny, all the human musicians that learned music by listening to other's music want to be paid for the music they produce as well. Is that also wrong?
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This is an old, bad faith, nonsense argument that I can't bother to refute again. Thanks for playing.
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Translation: I can't refute it, but I also don't like it.
Howsabout a link to where you refuted it before.
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Every current musician was trained (or self trained) by listening to and analyzing music that was copyrighted. Are they also infringers?
Coldfusion talks about these A.I. and lawsuits (Score:2)
They're probably right. (Score:3)
All of this crap claiming "infringement" because an AI trained on it needs to go away. Show me ANY musician that became successful (or even mediocre) having never listened to any music whatsoever. Show me ANY artist who never looked at a painting or photograph before in their life.
You CAN'T. Either literally every artist, sculptor, musician, writer, and photographer since the dawn of their arts has been an infringer or AI is not.
Note, I am not addressing the question of "but is it any good". That is irrelevant. Though on a personal note I would say, often it is not any good. Occasionally the sun shines on the million monkeys and it is. More usually, some human guides the AI through multiple iterations until it is good enough.
Can AI infringe? Of course, just like a human. Can it unintentionally infringe, of course, just like a human artist (see things like George Harrison sued over 3 notes). It's up to the user to catch that (possibly using other AI tools to assist) and refrain from publishing that. AI is hardly the first tool that CAN be used to infringe on copyright even though it has many non-infringing uses.
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All those me too features all over the place are just an amazing and ongoing coincidence?
AI Halting Problem (Score:2)
Are we at a point where humans who are trying to innovate new music won't be marketable so AI will be able to generate infinite approximations of all music styles that existed before 2024 but nothing new will effectively exist?
I don't think any studio artist owes royalties to the descendants of Davinci or Rembrandt but this problem shouldn't be ignored.
The best approach is probably to restore Copyright to 7 years, renewable for another 7, and let AI train on stuff 7-14 years old. Then humans could still com