Category: music

“Those genres and styles — the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music — are not something that anyone owns,” the companies said. “Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself.” TorrentFreak reports: “[The labels] frame their concern as one about ‘copies’ of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology — that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don’t want is competition.” The labels’ position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren’t stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, “outputting a collage of ‘samples’ stitched together from existing recordings” when prompted by users.

“[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings,” Suno explains. “From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings — what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on.” These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it’s from that information new music is made.

Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that’s certainly not the case here. “The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement.” With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, “that key point makes all the difference,” Suno’s conclusion is served raw. “That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs’ claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product.” Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion.

In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a “no AI” policy on licensees, to claims that they “may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal.” The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels’ dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control. “No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine. “Plaintiffs’ contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values.” You can read Suno and Udio’s answers to the RIAA’s lawsuits here (PDF) and here (PDF).

Spotify usually requests lyrics from songwriters, publishers, and independent artists. However, in most other cases, the company has a working relationship with MusixMatch to provide lyrics, and perhaps Spotify isn’t willing to absorb the costs of this partnership. That would explain why lyrics are now paywalled, but as a free-tier user, such changes are chipping away at the service’s appeal.

UMG has been sending takedown requests to the streamers “left and right,” FT quoted an unnamed source as saying. “We have become aware that certain AI systems might have been trained on copyrighted content without obtaining the required consents from, or paying compensation to, the rightsholders who own or produce the content,” the company said in an email from last month, according to the report. “We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists.” The website drayk.it delivered users a custom Drake song, although it has since been shut down.

However, while the app is being announced today, it’s only available for preorder on the App Store for now. The release date will be later this month, on March 28. In addition, the app will only support iOS devices running iOS 15.4 or newer at launch. Apple Music Classical will present a simple interface for engaging with classical works. Users will be able to search by composer, work, conductor or even catalog number, to locate recordings. These can be streamed in high-quality audio of up to 192 kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless. And thousands of recordings will be available in Apple’s immersive spatial audio, as well.

The app will also let users dive into the recordings to read editorial notes about the composers and descriptions of their key works. Famous composers will have their own high-resolution digital portraits available, which Apple commissioned from artists. These were designed with color palettes and artistic references from the relevant classical period, Apple notes, and more will be added in time. At launch, portraits will be available for Ludwig van Beethoven, Frederic Chopin and Johann Sebastian Bach. The service will continue to be updated with new music over time, too. There’s no additional charge for Apple Music Classical if you’re an Apple Music subscriber. Android support is coming “soon.”

America’s Justice Department “has opened an antitrust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster,” reports the New York Times. But the investigation “predates the botched sale” and “is focused on whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry.”

The new investigation is the latest scrutiny of Live Nation Entertainment, which is the product of a merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster that the Justice Department approved in 2010. That created a giant in the live entertainment business that still has no equals in its reach or power…. The debacle involving Ms. Swiftâ(TM)s concert tickets this week has exacerbated complaints in the music business and in Washington that Live Nationâ(TM)s power has constrained competition and harmed consumers.
Or, as NPR puts it, “The frenzy has brought renewed scrutiny to the giant Ticketmaster, which critics have long accused of abusing its market power at the expense of consumers.”

Would-be concertgoers have complained vocally about recent incidents with near-instant sellouts and skyrocketing prices, and artists like Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have feuded with it over the decades. One common complaint is that there doesn’t seem to be a clear alternative or competitor to Ticketmaster, especially after it merged with concert provider Live Nation in 2010 (a controversial move that required conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Justice).

Now Tennessee’s attorney general, a Republican, is opening a consumer protection investigation into the incident. North Carolina’s attorney general announced on Thursday that his office is investigating Ticketmaster for allegedly violating consumers’ rights and antitrust laws. And multiple Democratic lawmakers are asking questions about the company’s dominance â” not for the first time…. “Taylor Swift’s tour sale is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly,” tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of several lawmakers who has long called for investigation and accountability into the company, especially after becoming a subsidiary of concert behemoth Live Nation.

The article also cites a Thursday statement from Ticketmaster:
The company says that using Verified Fan invite codes has historically helped manage the volume of users visiting the website to buy tickets, though that wasn’t the case on Tuesday. “The staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests â” 4x our previous peak,” it said, adding that it slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilize its systems, resulting in longer wait times for some users.

It estimates that about 15% of interactions across the website experienced issues, which it said is “15% too many.”

The Tuesday sale also broke Ticketmaster’s record for most tickets sold for an artist in a single day,” reports People, “selling two million tickets.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for submitting the story.