Inside the Music Industry's High-Stakes A.I. Experiments
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Abstraction: Universal Music Group navigating generative AI threats and partnerships
Key points:
- UMG CEO Lucian Grainge partnered with YouTube/Google DeepMind on Lyria generative music AI, launching an "artist incubator" with artists including Don Was and Björn Ulvaeus
- YouTube Dream Track experiment let 100 creators use AI-generated voices of 9 artists (including John Legend, Demi Lovato, Troye Sivan) to create 30-second Shorts
- Major labels' share of streaming content fell from ~90% to ~10% over a decade; 184M tracks on platforms with 86.2% getting under 1,000 plays/year
- Grainge pushed "artist-centric" royalty model; Spotify adopted a 1,000-plays/year revenue threshold in 2024
- Universal Music Publishing Group sued Anthropic for copyright infringement in training data for Claude
- Google's SynthID watermarks AI-generated audio/video content to enable detection
Connections: Universal Music Group · Lucian Grainge · Google Deepmind · Youtube · Generative AI · AI Copyright
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/inside-the-music-industrys-high-stakes-ai-experiments