AI Music

Last week I was at Music Ally Connect in London- and as you can well imagine AI took it’s usual place as the topic du jour. Despite being well trodden ground there was some fascinating elements- both trends from the day at large and specific comments that gave insight to how the Music industry is currently both thinking about and preparing for (/guarding against) AI. Mostly these broadly fell into 3 camps- intense negativity, bullish positivity and cautious ambivalence.

In 2017 Google’s AlphaZero defeated the longstanding championship winning Stockfish 8 program at the game of Chess. AlphaZero only learned the game through machine learning, by playing itself. To conquer the world’s most powerful chess engine it only took 4 hours of training. 4 hours vs. the entire accumulation of human knowledge about the game. In Harari’s words- “Because AlphaZero learned nothing from a human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional

The music publishing industry is no stranger to disruption. Every year seems to bring a new wave of technological, economic, or cultural change that evolves how music is consumed, and subsequently licensed and monetised. Keeping a keen eye on the data for areas of potential growth provides rights holders with a super power. Seeing what opportunities are developing, at what rate, and what the uplift is likely to look like as the revenue converts down the pipeline- particularly

Art has a fine line to navigate- a continuum where defining itself has far reaching implications- from the law to the economy. In almost every era of history, the same debate has resurfaced in music: art, or business? Music is expression, storytelling, and ‘soul’. It is connectivity and communication that crosses borders and languages- transcending individuals, able to curate emotion, to create community and even manifest radical action. The romantic answer is “art,” of co

There’s never been a better time to be a global music fan. Korean pop groups dominate the Billboard charts. Latin megastars headline the world’s biggest festivals. Afrobeats is on everyone's playlists. A user in Jakarta can stream a Nashville singer-songwriter seconds after their release… music’s reach is truly borderless.

The Major record labels and two of the most prominent generative music platforms, Suno and Udio, have reportedly moved from trading lawsuits to negotiating licenses. These generative AI platforms were(/still are) facing litigation for using copyrighted music to train their models. Now they’re sitting at the table with the very same rights holding companies, working out deals that will both legitimise and monetise their models.