Speaker 1: I think a lot of people think it's just going
Speaker 1: to be great. If we just make these things, they're
Speaker 1: just going to be great, and we're fine. And a
Speaker 1: lot of people think this is definitely a dystopia, and
Speaker 1: we're definitely for it, and I think it can truly
Speaker 1: be a third thing.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
Speaker 2: social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Speaker 2: Tim O'Brien. Today's Crash Course Artificial Intelligence versus the Music Industry.
Speaker 2: The voice you heard at the open was producer and
Speaker 2: songwriter Extraordinary Grimes speaking to us about the good, the bad,
Speaker 2: and the in between of artificial intelligence and music. The
Speaker 2: AI hype may be starting to die down overall, but
Speaker 2: AI isn't going away. You can literally hear it in music.
Speaker 2: Back in April, a super convincing AI duet between rapper
Speaker 2: Drake and singer The Weekend went viral, causing panic in
Speaker 2: the music industry, and it opened the floodgates for deep
Speaker 2: fakes like Frank Sinatra singh hip hop and a fictional
Speaker 2: Oasis mixtape called Aisis. It's not just novelty memes either.
Speaker 2: AI generated background music is sneaking into your Spotify playlist,
Speaker 2: cracking out chill soundscapes, and helping the Beatles put out
Speaker 2: one last song called Now and Then. So music is
Speaker 2: again on the cusp of huge tech driven change. Twenty
Speaker 2: years after file sharing misfit Nabster made CD collections obsolete.
Speaker 2: To help us delve into what that change might look like,
Speaker 2: we at Bloomberg Opinion set one of our columnist detectives,
Speaker 2: Lionelle Laurent, out to investigate. Lionelle is a writer who
Speaker 2: wears many hats, one of which involves keeping an eye
Speaker 2: on digital innovation and upheaval in the music industry, and
Speaker 2: he has a tale to tell. Hi, Lianel, Hi, sim
Speaker 2: I'll let our listeners know that you've been working on
Speaker 2: this from Paris, So before we get started, why music well.
Speaker 3: Music is a personal passion of mine, and music is
Speaker 3: part of what makes as humans, So seeing AI take
Speaker 3: on more of that is I think a big cultural moment.
Speaker 3: But music as an industry has also served as a
Speaker 3: kind of canarian, the coal mine for wider tech disruption,
Speaker 3: including streaming. It really holds a mirror up to the
Speaker 3: rest of the economy, so I think it's important for
Speaker 3: everyone to follow this well.
Speaker 2: I'm going to hand it over to you to tell
Speaker 2: us what you've learned, and I'll catch up with you
Speaker 2: later in the show.
Speaker 3: Thanks Tim. Now, I'm willing to bet that you probably
Speaker 3: haven't heard of French songwriter bunoits Care. He's got a
Speaker 3: special claim to music fame. He's behind the first ever
Speaker 3: song composed by artificial intelligence. It's called Daddy's Car and
Speaker 3: it was released in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: In Daddy's Car Sound. So do we like something new?
Speaker 1: It ms?
Speaker 3: This isn't one hundred percent AI. Bern Noir wrote the
Speaker 3: lyrics and arranged the song, and that's him singing, but
Speaker 3: the rest was composed by an AI model trained entirely
Speaker 3: on songs by the Beatles, using all those Fab four classics.
Speaker 3: The machine came up with its own suggestions and ideas.
Speaker 3: It's like if John, Paul, George and Ringo had a
Speaker 3: fifth robotic friend jamming away and Bernoit playing with the results.
Speaker 4: I played with the tool. I fed it with fifty
Speaker 4: songs of the Beatles, my favorite songs of the Beatles,
Speaker 4: and then I got a result eight bars and then
Speaker 4: it was funny, and I continued.
Speaker 3: So I think we can agree this AI music isn't
Speaker 3: quite at the level of let it be Still. Daddy's
Speaker 3: car was a kind of milestone, and for bu Noir
Speaker 3: it is like improvising or writing a regular song hunched
Speaker 3: over a piano. He's been using tech to make music
Speaker 3: since the days of the Commodore sixty four kids ask
Speaker 3: your parents what that is today. He does it all
Speaker 3: from his studio in Paris, a music geeks paradise, stuffed
Speaker 3: with guitars, real real tape and computers. It all helps
Speaker 3: inspire new ideas, which he puts out under the name Skiggit.
Speaker 3: That's Danish for shadow, inspired by a Haunds Christian Anderson
Speaker 3: tale about a shadow that's alive.
Speaker 4: AI helped me to explore an expected part of my creativity.
Speaker 4: It's like the shadow in the Tale of Anderssan with
Speaker 4: becoming something independent from the main character.
Speaker 3: This summer, Bnoir gave me a magical mystery tour of
Speaker 3: how AI could revolutionize music and why it shouldn't be
Speaker 3: banned or dismissed out of hand. First stop deep fakes
Speaker 3: like Heart on My Sleeve that Drake Weekend duet we
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier. Bernoir doesn't think the imitation game is all
Speaker 3: that interesting musically or fair ethically, but he says it
Speaker 3: shows how AI has improved from the days of Daddy's
Speaker 3: Car to do some things incredibly well, like fooling the
Speaker 3: world into thinking a tambra transfer or vocal transfer is genuine.
Speaker 3: Here's Bernoir whipping up a similar kind of song in
Speaker 3: the style of Eminem.
Speaker 4: I asked Judge Appetty to write a song in the
Speaker 4: style of Eminem. I took this this result from jud
Speaker 4: Jipauty and I sung it and it created this result
Speaker 4: with Eminem's timber and you will hear that there is
Speaker 4: a French excellent. The weight of the world is crushing me.
Speaker 5: Down, trying to keep my head up, but I'm feeling
Speaker 5: as well, the thousand fears they're always lurking in my phrasal.
Speaker 6: Song is kind of hurting.
Speaker 3: Wow, that is pretty convincing, though I should mention we're
Speaker 3: not yet at the level of being able to hit
Speaker 3: a button and get instant deep fake back. This took
Speaker 3: several steps. A voice clone, an AI backing track, lyrics
Speaker 3: by chat GPT and Benoir's vocal cords like the so
Speaker 3: called Mechanical Turk, a fake chess playing robot that was
Speaker 3: all the rage and the seventeen hundreds. There is a
Speaker 3: human hidden in there.
Speaker 4: I got in two hours something that is from nothing
Speaker 4: with the voice of Eminem.
Speaker 3: Deep fakes are just the tip of the AI iceberg, though.
Speaker 3: Bunoir also showed us hybridization, a way to mix his
Speaker 3: voice with that of another singer's, in this case the
Speaker 3: late Chet Baker, and create the kind of weird new
Speaker 3: voice in between.
Speaker 4: Seevu chutt.
Speaker 1: That plan.
Speaker 4: Chutts too.
Speaker 3: The next step will be performers able to use these
Speaker 3: kinds of augmented voices on stage, manipulating not just the
Speaker 3: tone of a sinner's voice, but it's feel, it's groove,
Speaker 3: and eventually also have a machine able to do more,
Speaker 3: maybe all of the composing process. I asked Ben, why
Speaker 3: what it's like as a human dealing with the machine.
Speaker 4: The risk is to lose yourself and get bored by
Speaker 4: all the reasons that you get. Because AI is never tied,
Speaker 4: you can always generate, and I must say that often
Speaker 4: lead the results are not so good. Most of the
Speaker 4: results are like average. It takes time to get the
Speaker 4: result that you were expected, or the result that will
Speaker 4: inspire you to finish the song.
Speaker 3: What's your vision of the future, Then at which point
Speaker 3: do you become obsolete or unnecessary?
Speaker 4: If I can imagine a tool that will make and
Speaker 4: generate what you describe more like me Johne for the
Speaker 4: image for example, or Wali, I think orderly, I mean
Speaker 4: I think it will be great, and maybe it will
Speaker 4: replace some musician or it will be game changer.
Speaker 3: The ability to type in a text prompt and get
Speaker 3: a full song back sounds wild and also pretty dangerous
Speaker 3: when you consider those replaced musicians. But let's face it,
Speaker 3: a sense of danger is not going to slow down
Speaker 3: this tech race, and the finish line may be closer
Speaker 3: than we think. Ed Newton Rex is a composer turned
Speaker 3: AI f Sconado. He says this year will be a
Speaker 3: major milestone towards one hundred percent computer written songs, though
Speaker 3: for him, the real value of AI will be in
Speaker 3: collaborating with and inspiring humans. He points to his own
Speaker 3: work I Stand in the Library, which you can hear
Speaker 3: in the background, as an example of that. He wrote
Speaker 3: the music, but he got AI to write the lyrics.
Speaker 7: This isn't just about kind of creating a three minute
Speaker 7: song having AI do that. Once you have an artificial
Speaker 7: entity that's essentially musical.
Speaker 6: There is so much you can do.
Speaker 7: You can ask it for ideas, you can ask it
Speaker 7: for inspiration, you can have interplay with it, you can
Speaker 7: get it to fill in extra parts in the music
Speaker 7: you're making. You can kind of do anything with it
Speaker 7: that you could do with a human musician working with you.
Speaker 7: And I think that's where it gets really exciting.
Speaker 3: All this enthusiasm for AI has kind of surprised me. Clearly,
Speaker 3: Bonoir and Edge showed that there's real human creativity going
Speaker 3: into AI music. I came into this expectant to find
Speaker 3: tone def tech bros, not real musicians. But I'm also
Speaker 3: feeling uneasy about it. Even setting aside the messy ethics
Speaker 3: raised by AI that's trained on other artists' work, I'm
Speaker 3: starting to get nagging flashbacks of the Disney cartoon Fantasia
Speaker 3: I saw as a kid. Remember the Sources Apprentice, when
Speaker 3: Mickey Mouse starts getting addicted to his productive time saving tool,
Speaker 3: creating an army of broomsticks to do his chores chaos.
Speaker 3: Since hughes as control is lost, and imagining an uncontrolled
Speaker 3: release of AI models and voice clones does not inspire confidence.
Speaker 3: I asked the while what the dangers of this might be.
Speaker 4: I think that Eminem remembers all the songs that he
Speaker 4: has done, so he will easily say no, it's not me.
Speaker 4: So I don't think that this kind of demo, this
Speaker 4: kind of process is really dangerous. But hybotization, as I
Speaker 4: show it begins to be dangerous because you can't control.
Speaker 4: It's hard to control. If I didn't said to you
Speaker 4: like like it's I did it with Chet Baker, you
Speaker 4: wouldn't have recognized Chet Baker, So that becomes a bit
Speaker 4: dangerous here. And it's dangerous also because you can do
Speaker 4: it very easily.
Speaker 3: We have to wonder about unattended consequences like misinformation, misuse,
Speaker 3: and bias too. Last year, a fictional computer generated rapper
Speaker 3: called fn Meeker, complete with green hair and nose rings
Speaker 3: and teeth grills, sparked an online backlash after his lyrics
Speaker 3: used racial slurs and trivialized police brutality. Will the toxic
Speaker 3: content we've seen from aichatbots like chat GPT be any
Speaker 3: more acceptable if it's set to music. This is fundamentally
Speaker 3: about humanity versus technology, says musicians, writes advocate Crispin Hunt
Speaker 3: once a member of nineties British pop band The Long Pigs.
Speaker 8: Paul McCartney singing the Beach Boys is really amusing, Or
Speaker 8: Drake and the Weekend doing a duet on somebody else
Speaker 8: is really amusing. I would be totally freaked out if
Speaker 8: somebody took my voice, and I think we as humans
Speaker 8: need to get in front of that very quickly, before
Speaker 8: before the concrete set before it's set in and before
Speaker 8: mistakes get made, or we just give in to this
Speaker 8: idea that you know, oh it's progress, you can't stop progress.
Speaker 8: But there's a great line by a Polish dissident poet,
Speaker 8: courseeddann islav Lek, which said, is it progress for the
Speaker 8: cannibal eats with a fork?
Speaker 2: Ouch?
Speaker 3: So maybe there is a thin line between the well
Speaker 3: meaning digital composers and the evil fork wielding cannibals. The
Speaker 3: next big question is what is the music industry doing
Speaker 3: about it? Well, the first response from the record labels
Speaker 3: has been straight out of the naps to playbook, fight, Fight, Fight.
Speaker 3: But this isn't the year two thousand anymore. They're good
Speaker 3: at it now. When the NP three landed, record companies
Speaker 3: were like a grandparent trying to understand how to work
Speaker 3: their new smartphone. Today, they've rebuilt themselves around a small
Speaker 3: number of streaming platforms like Spotify. It's a lot easier
Speaker 3: to make digital pirates walk the plank, and there's been
Speaker 3: a lot of plank walking. Hearts on My Sleeve was
Speaker 3: quickly taken down from social media. Unauthorized voice cloning apps
Speaker 3: are being shut down, the Grammys have banned fully AI
Speaker 3: generated music, and Spotify is cracking down on bot activity
Speaker 3: on his platform. Here's Jeffrey Halston, general counsel for Universal
Speaker 3: Music Group, whose artists include Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran,
Speaker 3: testifying before the US Senate Judiciary Committee in July.
Speaker 9: AI in the service of artists and creativity can be
Speaker 9: a very very good thing. But AI that uses, or
Speaker 9: worse yet, appropriates the work of these artists and creators
Speaker 9: in their creative expression, their name, their image, their likeness,
Speaker 9: their voice without authorization, without consent simply is not.
Speaker 5: A good thing.
Speaker 3: And the music industry has also learned other lessons since
Speaker 3: the napster days. It knows if people really want to
Speaker 3: use something, death by lawsuit is not gonna work, and
Speaker 3: not all AI music is deep fate. Users of AI
Speaker 3: website Boomy have created over seventeen million weird sounding electronic tracks.
Speaker 3: For example, I have trouble getting through just one of them.
Speaker 3: But still maybe one day there'll be a hit in there,
Speaker 3: and not one that can be shut down by a lawyer.
Speaker 3: So here's the next twist. Record labels are done just
Speaker 3: playing defense. They now want to go on the offensive
Speaker 3: by making some AI music of their own that plays
Speaker 3: by their rules.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait, hold it right there, linell. This is shaping
Speaker 2: up to be quite the story, but we need to
Speaker 2: take a quick break and I'll see you on the
Speaker 2: other side.
Speaker 3: Sounds good to me.
Speaker 2: We're back with Lionell Lurn talking about AI and music.
Speaker 2: So Lionelle, let's hear more about how record labels are
Speaker 2: fighting back by co opting AI.
Speaker 3: Sure, it's a story that begins with a young entrepreneur
Speaker 3: based in Berlin called Oleg Stovitski, the AI starts up.
Speaker 3: He co founded Endel, made the music that you're listening
Speaker 3: to now. And Endel has just signed a landmark partnership
Speaker 3: with Universal Music group, that really anti deep fake label
Speaker 3: we heard from earlier, to make AI music use their
Speaker 3: huge catogy stars. And this all started with Oleg looking
Speaker 3: for music that would help them concentrate, similar to the
Speaker 3: work of ambient music pioneer Brian Eno.
Speaker 5: Every time I'm trying to concentrate, I listened to Brain,
Speaker 5: you know, and then noticed that a lot of his music,
Speaker 5: and a lot of ambient music in general started kind
Speaker 5: of popping up. When all of these functional music playlists
Speaker 5: and projects like music for Programming appeared.
Speaker 3: That got Oleg thinking, what if every time you hit play,
Speaker 3: the soundscape was different and fit your mood by monitoring
Speaker 3: data such as your real time heart rate or the
Speaker 3: time of day. That would be like having your own
Speaker 3: personal Brian Eno, made by a machine.
Speaker 5: I kind of turned to my co founders and I
Speaker 5: was like, well, I guess we're going to have to
Speaker 5: build an AI.
Speaker 3: This AI would be trained on a very specific set
Speaker 3: of musical building blocks, or stems. Stems can be thought
Speaker 3: of as these separate instruments or components that make up
Speaker 3: a song. Think of an individual drum beet, a keyboard line,
Speaker 3: a vocal melody.
Speaker 2: I've been to the top of Mount Everest, I've.
Speaker 9: Sailed the seven seats, I've shared the stage with all
Speaker 9: the best.
Speaker 3: As three separate stems, Endel's AI will then uniquely reassemble
Speaker 3: the stems into a new soundscape every time. Personally, it's
Speaker 3: not for me, but clearly there is a market for
Speaker 3: functional music. It represents an estimated seven to ten percent
Speaker 3: of the entire streaming market. Endel's next smart move was
Speaker 3: to blend that robotic AI with well known human artists
Speaker 3: like James Blake and Grimes. They submitted the stems and
Speaker 3: Endal did the rest and basic. This all on stems
Speaker 3: rather than existing albums or songs, means Endel gets official
Speaker 3: recognition as co composer of the real time soundscape. That's
Speaker 3: how Oleg says he avoided a fight with the music industry.
Speaker 5: With us, it was always the reaction was always a
Speaker 5: mix of through kind of genuine interest and almost excitement,
Speaker 5: and people were intrigued because we never removed the artists
Speaker 5: from this process. We never said, oh, you know, we
Speaker 5: just get the stamps from James Blake, but then we're
Speaker 5: going to produce like a million records and James is
Speaker 5: not going to be mentioned anymore.
Speaker 3: But the bigger hand'ed go, the more competition became unavoidable
Speaker 3: because money that would normally be going to the record
Speaker 3: labels is being diverted to text us ups making ambient music.
Speaker 3: The economics of streaming today are all about market share.
Speaker 3: Listen to a track on Spotify for more than thirty seconds,
Speaker 3: and it counts as a play, whether it's forty seconds
Speaker 3: of experimental electronic music, a three minute pop hit, five
Speaker 3: minutes of whale song. The more people click on ambient
Speaker 3: music rather than say, drake, the more it'll impact the
Speaker 3: bottom line. According to Golden Sachs, the three major labels
Speaker 3: market share has dropped from around eighty five percent to
Speaker 3: seventy one percent between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: which is why when the announcement of that landmark universal
Speaker 3: Endel deal for more record label approved AI music landed
Speaker 3: in May, it looks a lot like can't beat them,
Speaker 3: join them?
Speaker 5: You know they can. I just keep ordering takedowns. That
Speaker 5: is a road to nowhere. They need to have kind
Speaker 5: of an offensive strategy and they need to embrace this
Speaker 5: in some way in form and it's just turned out
Speaker 5: to be that Endel was kind of the only company
Speaker 5: that spent years kind of learning to speak the language,
Speaker 5: and then it's the dance of these labels.
Speaker 3: So what does a record label backed ambient AI do next?
Speaker 3: Ole extreme is to make new AI versions of artists
Speaker 3: existing catalogs. So, for example, Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift
Speaker 3: might one day offer Endel versions of their albums designed
Speaker 3: for sleep, work or exercise. And imagine if in the future,
Speaker 3: instead of Taylor's version, we get happy, sad or heavy
Speaker 3: metal versions of her albums.
Speaker 5: Essentially expands the universe of the artists. And it's just
Speaker 5: such a beautiful concept of creating a functional soundscape version
Speaker 5: of your favorite artist music.
Speaker 3: It's not just Endel. Other labels are sensing an opportunity.
Speaker 3: Warner Music's CEO recently praised an AI enabled duet between
Speaker 3: Costa Rican musician Pedro Capmani and the generated voice of
Speaker 3: his late father. Oh I asked Gairi, head of music
Speaker 3: group Believe, which owns a DIY music platform called tune Call,
Speaker 3: about this change of heart. Some might say double think
Speaker 3: in the industry.
Speaker 10: Whether it's for Believe or generally for the music industry,
Speaker 10: is an opportunity and not a threat. Why do people
Speaker 10: think AI is a threat generally because they do think
Speaker 10: that the deployment of AI will not be controlled and
Speaker 10: af the opposite view around this, which is that AA
Speaker 10: deployment will be heavily controlled and everyone is approaching AI
Speaker 10: with very a very strong sense of responsibility.
Speaker 3: That control means labels can set their own rules of
Speaker 3: engagement with AI. Deri gives four examples of rules that
Speaker 3: Believe is currently applying on AI. Music uploaded to its platform.
Speaker 3: Consent from the artist, control over the output, compensation, and transparency.
Speaker 10: That's how we're approaching the landscape today, and so we
Speaker 10: are not going to distribute tracks that are one hundred
Speaker 10: percent created by AI unless they meet some of these
Speaker 10: grit areas.
Speaker 3: Believe operates mainly in the mid market of artists rather
Speaker 3: than the superstars, and the hope is that industry friendly
Speaker 3: AI can dig up the next generation's bright young things
Speaker 3: by making it easier to unlock tunes sitting inside their
Speaker 3: heads again or while following the rules.
Speaker 10: We think the number of artists that gets educated for
Speaker 10: technology to become better musician is going to increase, and
Speaker 10: more people creating better music will find an audience. This
Speaker 10: is going to help frontline artists elevate and create better music.
Speaker 3: This optimism around control is also why YouTube has created
Speaker 3: a new set of rules for what it calls responsible
Speaker 3: AI music. But this all seems to be moving very fast.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of pressure on labels to be a
Speaker 3: first mover and sign deals with tech companies. I'll be
Speaker 3: sure that artists consent and all that precious data from
Speaker 3: their life's work isn't being handed over a little too quickly.
Speaker 3: And what if the focus on control starts to stifle creativity?
Speaker 3: If it trips up artists who are using AI but
Speaker 3: fairly without breaching copyright. Remember ed Newton Rex, who he
Speaker 3: heard from earlier in the show. In twenty fifteen, he
Speaker 3: wrapped about this exact thing when promoting his startup jute Deck,
Speaker 3: citing the copyright constraints faced by YouTubers looking for good
Speaker 3: background music.
Speaker 6: Imagine there's a video that you're creating, it's been weeks
Speaker 6: in the making, and your painstaking need take in it
Speaker 6: praying by prayer, have got the whole take looking really
Speaker 6: super great. Start to find the right music. If you've
Speaker 6: got a song you like, you're not allowed to use it.
Speaker 6: Copyright means if you choose it for your video, YouTube
Speaker 6: will just remove it. But this right stuff that's all unique.
Speaker 6: It will do it in any style U.
Speaker 3: See come Back, Fake Drake, all is forgiven? And going
Speaker 3: back to the Sorcerer's Apprentice, what if record label robots
Speaker 3: become so effective at expanding their catalog of stars that
Speaker 3: it makes it harder for the new generation of artists
Speaker 3: to cut through the noise. When does the revolution become stagnation.
Speaker 3: It's time to ask if there's an alternative to either
Speaker 3: the dystopia of no control or the utopia of total control,
Speaker 3: something like a third way that's maybe a little more
Speaker 3: punk rock, putting more power into the hands of the artists.
Speaker 3: And the best person to ask is Grimes, who we
Speaker 3: heard from at the beginning of the show. She is
Speaker 3: one famous artist who is actually embracing AI experimentation while
Speaker 3: also still trying to set limits, sort of like rapper
Speaker 3: Chuck Dee, who during the Napster era said downloadable music
Speaker 3: was a model to embrace. I asked Grimes first off,
Speaker 3: if she generally felt excited or worried about the current
Speaker 3: state of AI and music.
Speaker 1: I think I would say I'm quite both. One of
Speaker 1: the main things I'm doing right now is trying to
Speaker 1: figure out the ways to make this safe for humans,
Speaker 1: not even just existentially, but like socially and emotionally and civilizationally.
Speaker 1: But I also think that's totally possible.
Speaker 3: One of her biggest experiments is a new project allowing
Speaker 3: deep fakes or songs that clone her voice, which she
Speaker 3: announced when Hearts of My Sleeve went viral. She tweeted
Speaker 3: in April, feel free to use my voice without penalty.
Speaker 3: I have no label and no legal bindings. I guess
Speaker 3: it's not surprising Grimes as into AI, her dark electronic
Speaker 3: music already embodies a kind of tech human coexistence. She
Speaker 3: cultivates an extremely online sci fi anime persona, live streams
Speaker 3: video games, and assault digital art as NFTs. When I
Speaker 3: asked her how she sees AI being used in music,
Speaker 3: she compares it to auto tune, that instantly recognizable tool
Speaker 3: allowing anyone to hit those high notes.
Speaker 1: I am really pro democratizing the process. I have a
Speaker 1: pretty interesting, recognizable timber to my voice, but I have
Speaker 1: a weird speech, like ever Lis been, Like I just
Speaker 1: am not that in tune and I don't really care
Speaker 1: about being in tune, and like a producer, autotune is
Speaker 1: a good sort of like metaphor, because I think we got,
Speaker 1: especially in the last decade a lot more interesting and
Speaker 1: unique top blind than we'd gotten previous to that, because
Speaker 1: you had all these kind of brains that are not
Speaker 1: singer brains, like singing really well. And I think you
Speaker 1: especially get magic a lot of the time when you
Speaker 1: have someone who doesn't have the fundamental or it wasn't
Speaker 1: super trained in something and they just try it for
Speaker 1: the first time.
Speaker 3: So the more AI can support creators by lowering the
Speaker 3: barriers to entry for composition and production, the better that
Speaker 3: melody you just wrote on an acoustic guitar could quickly
Speaker 3: sound like a full band in the studio without actually
Speaker 3: needing the band or the studio.
Speaker 1: And I personally know a lot of artists who have
Speaker 1: really struggled the process of finding people who are good
Speaker 1: and then paying them can be really hard, and especially
Speaker 1: with the complexity of music publishing, that can be really hard.
Speaker 1: So if you can just sing a song and then
Speaker 1: get like a bunch of different generations of instrumentals behind it,
Speaker 1: I think for singers specifically and songwriters, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of opportunity there.
Speaker 3: Grime's inspiration for her own initial experiments with AI came
Speaker 3: from the idea of training a model on her own
Speaker 3: work bottling her entire style into a product, not just
Speaker 3: one particular sample, effect or tone. She imagined a database
Speaker 3: of all sorts of different music producers from Timberland to
Speaker 3: underground hadent like the late producer Sophie, getting a reliable
Speaker 3: income from selling this type of data. And then came
Speaker 3: the hype and the panic around Hard on my Sleeve,
Speaker 3: which served as a kind of wake up call to
Speaker 3: get the debate around AI going.
Speaker 1: I think it's good for people to push the limits
Speaker 1: with what's legal so everyone sees what the technology can do.
Speaker 1: I tried to make my voice a bunch of times,
Speaker 1: but the technology just hadn't been there.
Speaker 3: Grimes partnered with Create Safe to launch software called Elftech,
Speaker 3: which uses AI to replicate her voice. The way it
Speaker 3: works is this music creators can upload audio or record
Speaker 3: directly into the app, then receive a file with the
Speaker 3: same audio, but with Grinder's voice instead of their own.
Speaker 3: If the song gets an official release, the royalties are
Speaker 3: split fifty to fifty. Grinder's manager Lenard Doda told me
Speaker 3: when we spoke that fifty thousand people are using the
Speaker 3: product and they've had over one hundred thousand audio generations
Speaker 3: uploading their audio or playing with the tool. Over the
Speaker 3: more than one hundred grimes Ai songs that have been
Speaker 3: put on streaming platforms, one has over six hundred thousand plays,
Speaker 3: he says. And if you're wondering what grimes clone actually
Speaker 3: sounds like, here's a track by Bnoit Care Yes, mister
Speaker 3: Daddy's car himself called us Noir, in which grimes Ai
Speaker 3: replaces his vocals sung in.
Speaker 1: French Santan palin coofen Hesiod custom O Gas.
Speaker 3: Compared to how collaborations are normally done, this is way
Speaker 3: less paperwork, way less hassle, and way more streamlined than usual.
Speaker 3: Now there isn't just one Grimes, but potentially infinite Grimes,
Speaker 3: which is and always online twenty four to seven world
Speaker 3: of social media and music streaming is a huge advantage.
Speaker 3: This takes fan engagement into a new era. Grimes also
Speaker 3: reckons the music being created in the more AI future
Speaker 3: could actually sound more exciting than today's all you can
Speaker 3: listen to streaming buffet.
Speaker 1: If generative music is deployed very carefully and safely, you
Speaker 1: still create a environment where people want to create. You
Speaker 1: incentivize It's like you want to be a really unique
Speaker 1: producer so that you have a unique sound that it's
Speaker 1: worth training a model off of that is like recognizable.
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of times the algorithms, like
Speaker 1: the streaming algorithms, really encourage music to sound the same.
Speaker 1: This is something that I think would really encourage music
Speaker 1: to sound more different. And I think that is like
Speaker 1: a net good.
Speaker 3: So far, so good. But Grimes is not a utopian.
Speaker 3: She's also aware of the risks. I asked her what
Speaker 3: her red lines are, what the downsides are to this.
Speaker 1: I think, especially if the deep fakes, like people should
Speaker 1: have consent. I think that's super important, super essential, Like
Speaker 1: even though I'm doing this with my voice, I think
Speaker 1: there is potentially an argument that deefix should be illegal
Speaker 1: across the board. I don't actually see a long term
Speaker 1: utility for deep fix, like I see a lot of
Speaker 1: potential for political distress and like political unrest and harming
Speaker 1: especially women. Is it worth the emotional downsides? I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's part why I'm doing this, is running the experiment.
Speaker 3: Grimes has a point. It's tremendously powerful to imagine artists
Speaker 3: rather than tech platforms or record labels, leading the charge
Speaker 3: of AI clones for their own benefit, But the issue
Speaker 3: of control is still there. What if malicious actors, hackers,
Speaker 3: fraudsters use Grimes's voice to sing about hate crimes or
Speaker 3: to ruin her image. What if her own work becomes
Speaker 3: devalued as a result. What if a lot of bad
Speaker 3: content gets uploaded. If there's one big challenge hanging over
Speaker 3: a platform like elf tech, it's probably long term sustainability.
Speaker 3: It takes for alsays in bandwidth to believe a platform.
Speaker 3: So why do it makes sense that models would be
Speaker 3: run at the individual artist level. It should be done
Speaker 3: with a pragmatic, not idealistic approach. This is all moving
Speaker 3: very fast, and Grime says we need to slow down
Speaker 3: and think of all sorts of ways to minimize AI
Speaker 3: harms and maximize benefits.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people think it's just going
Speaker 1: to be great. Before we just make these things, They're
Speaker 1: just going to be great and we're fine. And a
Speaker 1: lot of people think this is definitely a dystopia and
Speaker 1: we're definitely fund and I think it can truly be
Speaker 1: a third thing. It just is going to require a
Speaker 1: lot of working together and stuff that we have not
Speaker 1: always displayed. We haven't always been great at that, but
Speaker 1: I really truly think there's no reason why we couldn't
Speaker 1: be better at that.
Speaker 5: Now, what's your vision of a future?
Speaker 3: How we consume music? And where is your voice? Is
Speaker 3: it everywhere? What's your what's your for me?
Speaker 1: Personally? I love that, I love I always use these
Speaker 1: two examples. But I think League of Legends and Harry
Speaker 1: Potter have done a very good job of not punishing
Speaker 1: fan art. They don't seem to issue takedowns like they don't.
Speaker 1: They let people sell prints of like League of Legends
Speaker 1: characters and stuff, right people, There's just like it issanly
Speaker 1: prolific amount of Harry Potter fan art, and it makes
Speaker 1: the community richer and super engaged. And Grimes is like
Speaker 1: pretty different from how I am and I see rhymes.
Speaker 1: It's more of a character as a science fiction project.
Speaker 1: It's just all these things, And I don't feel bad
Speaker 1: about not having ownership of that. I would like it
Speaker 1: to not do harmful things. But it's like you look
Speaker 1: at like Disney, It's like a lot of the best
Speaker 1: Disney stuff was made after Whalt Disney was dead.
Speaker 3: So maybe there is that third way between Utopia and
Speaker 3: dystopia after all, And maybe there is a chance at
Speaker 3: a more punk rock independent approach and what the big
Speaker 3: companies are offering. But we soon need to talk about
Speaker 3: some of the real existential risks that are being posed
Speaker 3: by AI, and also why Rick Astley could be the
Speaker 3: key to one of the most burning issues out there, copyright.
Speaker 2: Did you say, Rick Eshlee?
Speaker 3: Yes, Tim, I'm never going to give you up, never
Speaker 3: going to let you down. And actually that's the closest
Speaker 3: we're ever going to get to a Rick role.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm excited to hear more as I've been throughout
Speaker 2: this episode, but let's take another quick break and then
Speaker 2: pick this back up on the other side. Sure, Okay,
Speaker 2: we're back with Bloomberg opinion columnist Lionel Laurent, and we're
Speaker 2: reaching the end of our journey into the world of
Speaker 2: AI and music. What's next, Lionel?
Speaker 3: So we've talked a lot about them big techtonic shifts
Speaker 3: around our music, but we haven't really talked about the
Speaker 3: existential threat at the heart of this story. There are
Speaker 3: two hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and thirty eight
Speaker 3: identified singers and musicians out there, according to the twenty
Speaker 3: sixteen US Census, and that is, of course only talking
Speaker 3: about the States, they won't be able to keep up
Speaker 3: with a deep pocketed AI industry that's attracting money and talent.
Speaker 3: And even if we keep telling ourselves we'll always value
Speaker 3: human connections, the fact is these musicians are already under
Speaker 3: pressure from streaming. The top one percent of artists on
Speaker 3: Spotify and ninety percent of the royalties, meaning that for
Speaker 3: everybody else, live music has become essential as a way
Speaker 3: to make a musical living. But even that is getting
Speaker 3: tough as top concert tours from superstars like Taylor Swift
Speaker 3: get bigger, pricier, and more dominant. Singer and songwriter Taylor
Speaker 3: Swift has a new reputation for boosting the US economy.
Speaker 3: It's estimated that her tour could generate over four and
Speaker 3: a half billion dollars in consumer spending. More musicians acquitting
Speaker 3: the industry unable to make a living, and it's become
Speaker 3: normal to see Grammy nominees working as realtors. Sam Grimley
Speaker 3: is one musician who spent years performing with artists including
Speaker 3: Tom Jones and Ed Sheering, but whose sins has left
Speaker 3: the industry.
Speaker 11: Being a touring musician is the best job in the
Speaker 11: world for someone who's twenty five years old. But once
Speaker 11: you get to a certain stage in life, the sort
Speaker 11: of glamour starts to fade and you start to want
Speaker 11: slightly different things in life. So I wanted a slightly
Speaker 11: more stable existence. When I launched my music career, it
Speaker 11: was around the time that Napster was turning the music
Speaker 11: industry upside down, and over the next fifteen years roughly
Speaker 11: the overall revenue from recorded music absolutely plummeted. So in
Speaker 11: a sense, I was lucky that I had gone into
Speaker 11: live music industry. But another way of looking at that
Speaker 11: is it became increasingly the only option for musicians to
Speaker 11: make a viable living.
Speaker 3: So if there is an existential threat out there, it's
Speaker 3: that the combined forces of streaming and AI will break
Speaker 3: music's long running passion principle. This is the force that
Speaker 3: keeps new musicians coming up and dreaming that they just
Speaker 3: might have a shot and making it big, even if
Speaker 3: so many of them don't. If AI music is so
Speaker 3: successful that it's smothers platforms like Spotify and disincentivizes new
Speaker 3: music completely, that would be a disaster.
Speaker 11: I do think AI could replace some aspects of what
Speaker 11: musicians currently do. It seems entirely plausible that in the
Speaker 11: very near future we could end up with AI session
Speaker 11: musicians who are able to replicate the feel or the
Speaker 11: sound of various famous musicians, and that really does represent
Speaker 11: a serious threat to people for whom session performance is
Speaker 11: their livelihood.
Speaker 3: The poetic twist is that Sam is now a lawyer
Speaker 3: and he talked to us about copyright, an issue that seems,
Speaker 3: let's face it, a little dull, but it's actually absolutely
Speaker 3: critical to the AI story. Copyright protects the ability to
Speaker 3: profit from art, and it also incentivizes the creation of
Speaker 3: new works. Maybe we need to strengthen it or adapt
Speaker 3: it to AI proof future generations.
Speaker 11: Those AI systems are trained on human creations, so there's
Speaker 11: a question mark over whether those creators would or could
Speaker 11: be adequately credited, compensated, or able to control the output
Speaker 11: of those systems.
Speaker 3: For example, imagine an AI trained on the Rolling Stones
Speaker 3: that outputs a piece that sounds like but isn't actually satisfaction.
Speaker 3: Might the rolling Stones have a case for compensation. Maybe
Speaker 3: we need new rights to those musical stems that go
Speaker 3: into an AI or an artist's general feel or groove.
Speaker 3: And that is where Rick Astley comes in.
Speaker 11: There's a very interesting case being brought in California by
Speaker 11: Rick Astley, and he's essentially claiming that imitation of his
Speaker 11: voice is an infringement of his right. An AI system
Speaker 11: is trained to sound like or trained to have the
Speaker 11: feel of I don't know, Ringo Star, could Ringo Star
Speaker 11: demand a royalty fee, or demand a license fee, or
Speaker 11: prevent the usage of that track?
Speaker 3: To be clear, that Rick Asley case refers to a
Speaker 3: human imitating his voice, not AI and Ashley also settled
Speaker 3: out of court, but the fundamental legal principle remains the same.
Speaker 3: Record labels are actually pushing for a new federal right
Speaker 3: of publicity law that would protect artists against the unauthorized
Speaker 3: use of their likeness or identity. Another way to AI
Speaker 3: proof copyright is by considering the possibility of some kind
Speaker 3: of junior credit to the machine itself. This has been
Speaker 3: explicitly ruled out by the recent Screenwriters Union deal in Hollywood,
Speaker 3: but in music things aren't settled yet. Crispin Hunt, who
Speaker 3: we heard from earlier in the show, thinks this might
Speaker 3: help us also re evaluate the role of bots and
Speaker 3: AI and perhaps allow us to pay their human counterparts more.
Speaker 8: I believe we need to give AI some form of
Speaker 8: formalized not quite copyright, but maybe a neighboring right so
Speaker 8: that it has a value. Otherwise it will be completely free,
Speaker 8: and that will completely undermine the possibility of humans making
Speaker 8: a living from music.
Speaker 3: Some of that is getting closer. The website Boomy says
Speaker 3: that music produced using its platform belongs to Boomy, and
Speaker 3: albums produced by Endel carry its name on the songwriting credits.
Speaker 3: If that were also accompany by better transparency on what
Speaker 3: is AI and what is human music, we could be
Speaker 3: at the start of a more positive debate about better
Speaker 3: rewarding authentic human creativity.
Speaker 8: I think it would be fairly straightforward for the streaming
Speaker 8: services to have a button that you can flip where
Speaker 8: you listen to only sixty percent created human music, or
Speaker 8: you can set a level if if the robot music
Speaker 8: has some kind of neighboring right or copyright, then I
Speaker 8: don't think the streaming services can charge as much. I
Speaker 8: think they can charge twenty quid a month for organic
Speaker 8: human made music and three quid a month if you're
Speaker 8: going to be listening to robots.
Speaker 3: Crispin's idea could be getting closer to reality. Universal Music's
Speaker 3: partnership with Deezer proposes to pay human artists more above
Speaker 3: a certain threshold, but more needs to be done. This
Speaker 3: could be a good moment to consider a whole new
Speaker 3: payment model for streaming, such as the user centering model,
Speaker 3: which would take everybody's individual subscription fees and pay them
Speaker 3: out according to what they actually listen to themselves on Spotify.
Speaker 3: The current system puts all of the fees into one
Speaker 3: pot and distributes them according to market share. So I
Speaker 3: think ultimately, even as there is so much to grapple
Speaker 3: with when it comes to AI, there's one big positive.
Speaker 3: It just might force us to put a new value
Speaker 3: on what's authentically human and that might just be the
Speaker 3: third way between utopia and dystopia that keeps artists stepping
Speaker 3: up to the plane.
Speaker 2: Okay, Leonel, I have to jump in again. As you know,
Speaker 2: crash course is all about learning something new, and we
Speaker 2: don't let anybody get off the show without telling us
Speaker 2: what they've learned. So what were your key takeaways?
Speaker 9: So?
Speaker 3: I guess one takeaway is that AI is already hit,
Speaker 3: so the debate needs to shift to how to use
Speaker 3: it safely and also how to change the industry's economics
Speaker 3: to put human artists first. I think what isn't clear
Speaker 3: is the actual level of demand that exists for AI music.
Speaker 3: I mean Napster and made everyone feel like a kid
Speaker 3: in a candy stool. This feels a little more niche
Speaker 3: like VR or even the metaverse. I think, though, it's
Speaker 3: clear that tech is taking over more and more of
Speaker 3: music and culture, and that is going to be what
Speaker 3: ultimately holds lessons for the rest of the economy.
Speaker 2: All right, Leonelle, that's a wrap. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me. This was fun.
Speaker 2: Crash course. We believe the collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
Speaker 2: and always instructive. In today's crash Course, I learned that
Speaker 2: while AI is turning the music industry on its head,
Speaker 2: as it is so many other industries, there's also some
Speaker 2: very smart and creative people trying to figure out how
Speaker 2: to navigate around some of those problems. What did you learn?
Speaker 2: We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet at
Speaker 2: the Bloomberg Opinion handle at Opinion or me at Tim
Speaker 2: O'Brien using the hashtag Bloomberg Crash Course. You can also
Speaker 2: subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now, and
Speaker 2: please leave us a review. It helps more people find
Speaker 2: the show. This episode was produced by Moses Adam, Linael
Speaker 2: Laurant and Anna mas Rakas. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson,
Speaker 2: and we had editing help from Sagebauman, Jeff Grocott, Mike
Speaker 2: Nitze and Christine Vanden Bilart. Blake Maple says. Our sound
Speaker 2: engineering and our original theme song was composed by Luis Kara.
Speaker 2: I'm Tim O'Brien. We will be back next week with
Speaker 2: another Crash course