July 2024

Let’s face it, musicians have always been screwed over by intermediaries.  Whether it’s the record labels, event organizers, tour managers, or in the last decade, the streaming platforms, music creators are constantly being handed the crumbs. Of course, those crumbs become millions when you’re a multi-billion brand like Taylor Swift, but the remaining 99% of musicians barely make a decent living from their art. To add insult to injury, Daniel Ek (Spotify’s CEO) recently stated that “the cost of creating content is close to zero,” angering many musicians, most notably Deadmau5, who threatened to pull his music from the platform: [Source] Ek has a point, though. With today’s AI generative platforms, music that was once the product of decades of musical education and daily dedication in the studio can now be emulated in seconds with a simple prompt. But where is the creator in all this process? How do we reward not only the writer of the prompt but also the original music that served as training data to produce that new piece of music? If you’ve been trying out music generation platforms like SUNO, you’ve noticed that their output sounds pretty commercial, almost as if it were trained by a historical set of Billboard’s top 100. This has led to a recent lawsuit filed by major labels like Universal, Sony, and Warner against SUNO and UDIO for copyright infringement: [Read More] SUNO recently announced a $125 million raise, but if this lawsuit were settled as filed, at $150,000 per infringed work, it could mean that if they used 10,000 songs from their catalog, the lawsuit would amount to $1.5 billion! More than 10 times their raise: [Read More]. The big question is: “How do we enable AI music generation to thrive while ensuring that human musicians and artists are rewarded and still incentivized to create new music?” A recent approach pushed forward by Roland and UMG, supported by 50 major MusicTech companies, has been to establish some basic principles for music creation with AI: [Source] **The seven Principles for Music Creation with AI are as follows:** 1. “We believe music is central to humanity.” 2. “We believe humanity and music are inseparable.” 3. “We believe that technology has long supported human artistic expression, and applied sustainably, AI will amplify human creativity.” 4. “We believe that human-created works must be respected and protected.” 5. “We believe that transparency is essential to responsible and trustworthy AI.” 6. “We believe the perspectives of music artists, songwriters, and other creators must be sought after and respected.” 7. “We are proud to help bring music to life.” While I appreciate the approach and support the principles pushed forward by these companies, they still fail to address the key issue with AI-generated music: “HOW DO WE REWARD THE CREATORS FOR NEWLY GENERATED AI MUSIC?” This is precisely the problem we are trying to solve at Soundwork. SUNO refuses to disclose which songs they are using to train their model, making this a black box, where we can’t know with complete certainty who to reward for a newly AI-generated song, even though it sounds very familiar to a famous artist that we know and love. The idea of Soundwork’s Sound NFT Standard and its novel reward mechanism is to approach the solution through an incentive mechanism, instead of the “stick” approach the music labels are taking. All the sounds, loops, and tracks within the Soundwork Marketplace have a unique creator, which has a public and undeniable footprint on the blockchain. Therefore, when our AI Music Maker uses these sounds to produce a new track, we know exactly who to reward and which revenue model to follow since this was set by the creator at the time of minting. By limiting our model to the sounds being minted within our platform, instead of making our training data a black box like the AI-generating platforms we use today, we can allow our model to be open and transparent. This approach ensures that artists and labels can adopt this model confidently, knowing that regardless of how their music is used for new creations, they can claim rewards fairly and without intermediaries. This is what Web3 was created for! And this is why we believe in it so strongly at Soundwork.io. If you’d like to know more about how we plan on preparing the music industry for the AI generation wave that is upon us, feel free to read our whitepaper: [Soundwork Whitepaper]. And if you like what you see, join us and become part of our journey. If you enjoyed this read, please give it a like and share it with your network. It means the world to us and it can help empower other MusicTech enthusiasts like you. 🎵✨ #MusicTech #AI #Web3 #NFT #Blockchain #Soundwork #FutureOfMusic #MusicIndustry #AIinMusic #DigitalTransformation #Innovation