Google and Universal Music Group (UMG) are in talks to compensate the music industry for using artists’ voices and melodies. Several artists’ voices have already been used in synthetic music without compensation, threatening their livelihoods.
People familiar with the matter said talks were underway to develop a new product to allow fans developing artificial intelligence (AI) music to pay artists for their content. If successful, artists responsible for almost one-third of the world’s music could opt in to earn extra income.
Dead Artists’ Voices Revived Through AI
The UMG-Google partnership may leverage tools Google recently developed to generate music from AI. Universal competitor Warner Music Group is also reportedly in similar talks with the tech giant.
Interested in learning more about generative AI? Find out more here.
Several dead artists have had their voices repurposed by AI, including jazz legend Frank Sinatra, country superstar Johnny Cash, and rap icons Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. Earlier this year, former Beatles star Paul McCartney recently used AI to recreate John Lennon’s vocals for a new Beatles album.
One TikToker recently created an AI-generated track using music previously released by Drake and The Weeknd. Lawyers for Universal Music Group later demanded its removal from Spotify.
Google Making Active Strides in Music and Deepfake Identification
If true, the UMG deal move could boost Google’s market prominence in AI amid Microsoft’s dominance through its partnership with OpenAI. At I/O 2023, Google’s annual flagship conference, it announced its improved Bard chatbot to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai also affirmed the company was working on tools to differentiate between organic and synthetic content. Watermarking would embed data capable of surviving modest file edits, while a metadata tool would append contextual data.
Additionally, the company recently announced a new language model MusicLM to generate music from text prompts. In response to copyright infringement concerns, Google said it had been working with artists to ensure the tool doesn’t violate intellectual property rights.
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