What if artists give their thumbs-up?
The latest deals will test what fans fan do when artists give their permission to place their music in the A.I. sandbox.
Warner Music, for example, whose catalog includes songs by stars like Madonna, Bruno Mars and, yes, Neil Young, struck a deal with Suno that will allow the service to use specific artists’ music if they opt in. Because “Madonna-style birthday song for my wife” may be much more interesting than “’80s synth-pop song.” Just who has, or will, opt in remains unclear.
What can I do with my A.I. creation?
The industry is still wrestling over whether to allow users to download their A.I.-generated track and upload it anywhere, or restrict it to the “walled gardens” of the programs that generated them.
Isn’t the world of A.I. music full of scams?
There are plenty of legitimate uses of A.I. by real musicians and curious amateurs, but yes, scams and fraud are a problem.
Deezer, a French steaming service, recently said that about 90,000 A.I.-generated tracks are uploaded to its platform every day — most of them low-quality slop that no one listens to.
Of the relative few that get clicks, Deezer says, as many as 85 percent are fraudulent. The scammer’s playbook: create A.I. songs, then unleash armies of bots to click on them to generate royalties. Under the financial pools used in streaming, the online platforms pay proportionate fees to the companies that provide content, meaning everything paid to bogus creators reduces what’s left for real artists.
Catching these fraudsters is a constant game of cat and mouse.
Recently, music industry groups, including the Grammys, have called for a labeling system to identify music that was made with generative A.I.
What do artists think?
They are not unanimous. Some, like the star producer Timbaland and the performer Grimes, have welcomed the technology and signaled their willingness to experiment.
Timbaland recently introduced a virtual artist named TaTa Taktumi, whose vocals on the song “Glitch x Pulse” were partly generated by A.I. software, though humans created 80 to 85 percent of the song, Timbaland said in an interview with The New York Times:
