SoundCloud is the latest music service announcing deals with AI companies. Three in its case: Fadr, Soundful and Voice-Swap. SoundCloud said its goal was to “introduce integrations that allow artists to upload songs created with assistive AI tools” directly to its platform.
The three startups are quite different, though. Voice-Swap is the company co-founded by artist and producer DJ Fresh to help musicians clone their own voices and license them to their peers for use in original tracks. Soundful is a tool to generate studio-quality music for creators, while Fadr is about creating mashups and remixes of tracks.
Each of the tools will now have an ‘Upload to SoundCloud’ option, of the kind seen in other music-creation tools. SoundCloud was keen to pitch these deals as “artist-first”, with CEO Eliah Seton saying it’s about seeing “how this technology can be applied to serve and empower artists”.
That strategy extends to “applying new methods to prevent AI abuse and protect its artists” too. SoundCloud is now blocking AI bots from crawling its site and training models on its catalogue.
That’s a good step, although there may be some concerns about whether the horse has bolted before this particular stable door was slammed shut. Music rightsholders are currently trying to ascertain which companies (if any) in the AI space may have already done this kind of crawling and scraping.
Talking of which… Billboard has raised some questions over Google and YouTube’s strategy on that front this week. In a report citing four (unnamed) sources, it claimed that Google trained its AI model “on a large set of music — including copyrighted major-label recordings — and then went to show it to rights holders, rather than asking permission first”.
YouTube does have some deals too: for example its partnership with Universal Music Group on a ‘music AI incubator‘ initiative and ‘Dream Track‘ product. It has also been praised by WMG boss Robert Kyncl – admittedly a former longtime YouTube exec – for “proactively reaching out to its partners to test and learn”.
Still, training first then seeking licences will remind other rightsholders of the heights of the ‘value gap’ arguments in years gone by, when the music industry claimed that the ‘safe harbours’ that enabled YouTube to have the world’s music uploaded to its platform gave it unfair leverage in licensing negotiations.
Is this the kind of issue regulators will be interested in? We may find out in the US soon. The Federal Trade Commission is interested in the generative-AI investments and partnerships of large technology companies, and has issued orders to five of them to provide information on that.
YouTube and Google’s parent company Alphabet is one of them, along with Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic – the latter being the company that is currently being sued by music publishers for lyrics copyright infringement.
