Major Music Labels Strike Deals With New AI Streaming Service (bloomberg.com) 46
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The world's largest music companies have licensed their works to a music startup called Klay, which is building a streaming service that will allow users to remake songs using artificial intelligence tools. Klay is the first music AI service to reach a deal with all three major record labels, Universal Music Group NV, Sony Music and Warner Music Group Corp., according to people familiar with the deals. Klay plans to announce its agreements in the coming days, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential plans.
Klay is building a product that will offer the features of a streaming service like Spotify, amplified by AI technology that will let users remake songs in different styles. Klay has licensed the rights to thousands of hit songs so that it can train its large language model. The company has positioned itself as a friend of the industry, offering assurances that the artists and labels will have some control over how their work is used. Klay is led by music producer Ary Attie and also employs former executives from Sony Music and Google's DeepMind, an AI laboratory.
Klay is building a product that will offer the features of a streaming service like Spotify, amplified by AI technology that will let users remake songs in different styles. Klay has licensed the rights to thousands of hit songs so that it can train its large language model. The company has positioned itself as a friend of the industry, offering assurances that the artists and labels will have some control over how their work is used. Klay is led by music producer Ary Attie and also employs former executives from Sony Music and Google's DeepMind, an AI laboratory.
Way to protect the artists (Score:3)
Jerkwads.
Re: Way to protect the artists (Score:2)
Is basic income looking better yet?
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Because billionaires are totally going to hand out vast amounts of money so people who don't make money for them can sit around at home watching pr0n.
UBI cultists love to talk about how evil the rich are while also claiming that the rich will pay them to do nothing productive. Because billionaires are such lovely, caring people.
Re: Way to protect the artists (Score:1)
What if billionaires don't fund the basic income? What if the Fed does, while offering individual inflation-proofed savings accounts so no one need fear nominal inflation?
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Billionaires own the government.
If they push for UBI it will be so they can easily separate the useless eaters from the productive people they need, and then they'll be sending Terminators around to everyone who claims UBI.
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UBI is about a law that makes them "care" about people. Nobody says the billionaires will do UBI by themselves, the proposed laws are about distributing wealth, not about asking nicely for donations.
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Jerkwads.
Way I see it, this isn’t about “protecting art,” it’s about protecting income streams. And honestly, that’s not the same thing. The artist who writes because they have to will create no matter what the lawyers do; the artist who writes because it pays the mortgage has to protect the parts of their work that copyright actually covers. Style isn’t protected. Vibe isn’t protected. Genre isn’t protected. What is protected is the melody, lyrics, and arrangement tha
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There are three groups:
1) People who like to do art. For having their own art, for recreation, for literally any leisure reason. Nobody prevents them from doing that. Your grandma may be still knitting.
2) People who do the craft for hire. They usually don't create because they particularly like the result, they just want to earn money. Automation threatens them, as it threatened other professions. Your grandma doesn't make money from knitting. Some people may make some money on Etsy, but you can rarely make
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Historically, musicians signed bad deals because the music labels were gatekeepers and if they wanted to have the success of a big popular band they had to sell their souls to get it.
Now musicians can make a decent living without having to sign their soul away. But thirty years ago there wasn't a lot of choice for most people.
Re: Musicians deserve what they demand (Score:2)
There might be a few musicians still under contract from 30 years ago, but nowadays, the vast majority of them would have had an opportunity to get off the treadmill.
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Sure, but in most cases their music is still owned by the label they signed their souls to. Who can license it to anyone they want to turn into AI slop.
Re: Musicians deserve what they demand (Score:2)
Is it possible that demand for AI slop is greater than demand for actual musician slop?
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There are some pretty good AI songs out there. Lots of really bad ones, but people who know what they're doing can now easily make the songs they want to hear.
I know someone who was a moderately-successful musician in the 90s (some Top 40 songs at the time) and now makes his own songs with AI after being out of music completely for twenty years. You could kind of tell the early ones were AI-generated but the later ones not really.
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Then again, "slop" is just the lates
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The latest moves to buy AI music companies are exactly that: They try to keep being gatekeepers.
They buy the service and instantly disable the download function, changing it from a tool for creatives to an entertainment service where users can play around a bit with but don't create anything they own (at least according to ToS, actual AI content copyright is more complicated).
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I demand that you have heard of me! But i didn't sign a deal, so you've never heard of me; and if i've not signed a deal, how are you gonna hear about me anyway? tiktok? spotify algorithms? fucking youtube? you think google, or the guy giving money to military AI development, or china deserves a portion of my money instead of the record label scumbags, who might at least put some man hours into promotion?
Or do you think every musician should also be obligated to be their own record company, performing
Re: Musicians deserve what they demand (Score:1)
First, no one has a right to make a living from their art.
Second, working musicians are a thing, and they don't need record labels to be successful.
Third, if you need an agent or manager, get an agent or manager. Just don't sign away your art and then complain you don't control it or benefit from it.
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Re: Musicians deserve what they demand (Score:2)
That's why you hire promoters. And if you can't figure out how to hire promoters, that's why you hire a manager.
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Re: Musicians deserve what they demand (Score:2)
While record labels do provide those services, they are primarily publishers. They use publishing contracts to force artists to use their in house staff to promote and produce, etc., thus extracting all the money they gave them up front and ensuring they are debt slaves to the record label.
That's not what a manager is. A manager is someone who works for you. And a competent and experienced manager will have all the contacts you need to record, publish, and promote without signing away your copyrights to a p
Who even wants this? (Score:3)
Re: Who even wants this? (Score:3)
Ever want to create a band with artists that didn't play together in real life? What if you could sit in?
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> What if you could sit in?
Then you still couldn't play at their level.
I don't get it either, beyond "10% more Bootsy, 100% less Flea on the bass", and algorithmic music generation?
Music is in a precarious place right now, but that sounds awful.
Re: Who even wants this? (Score:1)
It sounds like a tool for creating clickbait videos. CANNIBAL CORPSE IN THE STYLE OF BANANARAMA! sort of shit. But I think most people will get bored and cancel before their 30 day trial renews.
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This after all the butthurt when chart topper on spotify was an AI country music artist?
"Why do people prefer AI".
"No one wants AI".
Choose one.
P.S. Covers have never been a thing. Ever. No one wants them.
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I can see it being kinda interesting... Frank Sinatra does Napalm Death, or Taylor Swift does NWA.
But whatever fun there is to be had, you can be sure Klay won't be the place to find it. Whatever's in this deal, you can be sure it's so restrictive as to have knocked the fun out of it. We can't go letting any AI deal be actually successful, can we? What if people work out how little the 'record labels' actually do?
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Seriously, for what?
Honestly? For the laughs. But also for the insights. An LLM has billions of tokens to string together based on a prompt, compared to typical human adults, who have only a few tens of thousands of tokens to articulate an idea with. And this goes for non-verbal paradigms as well -- music and art are languages with idiomatic patterns that can be captured the same way Gemini or ChapGPT capture syntactic patterns in human writing. Not everybody is a Mozart or Michaelangelo, but machine learning let's everybo
the more things change... (Score:2)
The labels don't give a fuck. They have never been on the side of the artists. This is just another way they'll use to game the system to keep most of the profits in the system to themselves.
AI Music Sucks (Score:2)
My Discover Weekly playlist this week has 26 of 30 songs as bland AI generated trash. I don't know how my algorithm got to this point, considering that I have been skipping AI tracks whenever they come up. It has gotten beyond awful and there is still no dislike button. Is there a good alternative for music radio? Because Spotify has hit rock bottom.
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Update the app, Spotify has re-added the dislike button next to the "currently playing" information on the left.
Real music is made by musicians, playing live (Score:2)
Record labels are becoming increasingly irrelevant
AI "music" may end up being a popular fad, but I hope it's a short-lived fad
Musicians will continue making music. It's part of our nature
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I don't think anybody claims that musician will or should stop making music, just because AI music exists.
Tax 1 citizen, buy 5 voters (Score:1)
All benefits and UBI type schemes are forms of taxing 1 productive citizen and buy 5-6 voters, legal or frequently illegal, who will now sit around doing nothing at best and committing escalating crimes due to boredom at worst but will vote for that government.
This scam has been going on since decades in UK, EU, India and other countries for a long time and is now evident in the US too.
But it's a successful way to subvert democracy and capitalism both at one go for corrupt politicians in cahoots with foreig
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This is only the beginning (Score:2)
Since it's associated with AI, (and just as with the DotCom bubble), charlatans will have a chance to actually get their idiotic projects funded because VCs often fall victim to hype for things they don't understand.
Obviously, I'm not going to list any of these variations that easily come to mind, lest some may actuall