AI-Generated Music: Universal Music Group’s Concerns and Guidance Moving Forward
Imagine you are on social media and come across a new catchy song. It sounds just like your favorite artist, but little did you know it was created using artificial intelligence (“AI”). This was exactly the case with the song “Heart on My Sleeve.” “Heart on My Sleeve” was generated using AI and uploaded to social media by a user that goes by the name of ghostwriter.[1] The vocals in the song highly resembled the vocals of the artists Drake and The Weeknd.[2] The song racked up millions of plays across streaming platforms such as TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube, before it was taken down.[3]
“Heart on My Sleeve” is one of many examples that has helped expose the gray-area genre of AI-generated music.[4] Although AI-generated music may seem harmless on the surface, there are growing intellectual property concerns, such as copyright violations.[5] Since AI-generated songs are often generated without the artist’s consent, it leads to the question of what protections an artist has against their voices being used in this way.[6]
What is Generative AI and AI-generated Music?
Generative AI consists of using deep-learning models to generate content based on the input data they are trained on.[7] This allows for generative models to create new works that are similar to the original training data.[8] In the music world, generative AI is used to create new songs in which existing songs are used to train an algorithm to recreate melodies and musicians’ voices.[9]
Universal Music Group’s Response to AI-generated Music
Universal Music Group (“UMG”) invoked copyright violation to get “Heart on My Sleeve” taken down from music streaming platforms.[10] In April of 2023, UMG sent letters to music streaming platforms such as Spotify, urging them to block artificial intelligence platforms from training on their copywritten songs.[11] UMG’s action aimed to stop AI from harming the music industry since AI could potentially threaten artists that generate billions of dollars in revenue from the songs they produce.[12] Specifically, AI may harm the music industry if artists are not being properly paid and AI can create lyrics that are potentially damaging to a singer’s reputation.[13] An example of AI-generated music being potentially damaging to a singer’s reputation is if the lyrics are generated in a style that the actual artist would never sing in.[14] As a result of generative AI, it may be harder to distinguish real music from “fake” music and could lead to people benefiting from the success of others.[15]
Current Guidance Surrounding AI-generated Music
Despite a lack of current regulations specifying what AI can and cannot train, the U.S. Copyright Office released new guidance regarding how to register literary, musical, and artistic works made with AI.[16] The U.S. Copyright Office considers whether the AI contributions are either the result of ‘mechanical reproduction’ or an author’s ‘own original mental conception.’[17] Therefore, as the law stands, the author has to be human and the musical work cannot be completely computer-generated.[18] However, questions still remain as to the amount of human intervention needed to make AI-generated music copyrightable and who the copyright holder is if the face of the work is not a human.[19]
Footnotes
