Speaker 1: Already, and this is the Daily Art. This is the
Speaker 1: Daily os. Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 2: Good morning and welcome to the Daily Ours. It's Tuesday,
Speaker 2: the fourth of November. I'm Emma Gillespie.
Speaker 1: I'm Lucy Tassel.
Speaker 2: One of the world's biggest music companies, Universal has announced
Speaker 2: a major deal with an AI song generator, the first
Speaker 2: of its kind partnership would have been a pretty big
Speaker 2: global story on its own, but it's the fact that
Speaker 2: Universal had been trying to sue the very platform it's
Speaker 2: now working with that's added another layer of interest. Today
Speaker 2: we are going to unpack how we got here and
Speaker 2: what this deal means for the creative industry and the.
Speaker 1: Future of music. Emma, to kick things off, I think
Speaker 1: the best place to start is to explain who are
Speaker 1: the key players in this story and how have they
Speaker 1: interacted with each other up to this point. Yes.
Speaker 2: So, first we've got Universal Music Group UMG, a massive,
Speaker 2: massive company that owns labels including EMI, Capitol Records, def Jam,
Speaker 2: Virgin Music. It calls itself the world's leading music company,
Speaker 2: and for good reason. It represents artists including Taylor Swift,
Speaker 2: Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Sabrina Carpenter, The Weekend, Dochy Drake,
Speaker 2: Post Malone, you get the drift, I could go on,
Speaker 2: then we've got Udio. This is an AI music generator.
Speaker 2: So it launched in April last year with some backing
Speaker 2: from a few quite big names in tech that includes
Speaker 2: Will I Am the Musician and Instagram co founder Mike Krieger. Now,
Speaker 2: how it works is users can type prompts into a
Speaker 2: textbox on the platform and generate entirely new songs based
Speaker 2: on those instructions. So you could, for example, type something
Speaker 2: like upbeat song about podcasts and you'll get a song
Speaker 2: pretty quickly or almost instantly. Or you can even get
Speaker 2: more specific and request something that sounds like a particular
Speaker 2: genre or style like, for example, upbeat pop song in
Speaker 2: the style of Sabrina Carpenter about the Daily Os podcast.
Speaker 2: And you can even go as far to kind of
Speaker 2: describe the vibe that you want the song to kind
Speaker 2: of have, how you want listeners to feel when they
Speaker 2: hear it, and then the platform creates a track that
Speaker 2: matches your description.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this music platform, this AI music platform launchers
Speaker 1: last year. You mentioned up at the top that at
Speaker 1: some point, UMG decides to sue this platform, I assume
Speaker 1: for the reasons that you've described. Basically it can mimic
Speaker 1: its artists.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: In June last year, the Recording Industry Association of America
Speaker 2: announced Music's Big Three. So that's Universal, Sony and Warner
Speaker 2: had teamed up to take action against Udio, that very
Speaker 2: platform we just talked about, and another AI generator called Suno.
Speaker 2: The music groups basically accused these platforms of copyright infringement
Speaker 2: on what they called an almost unimaginable scale. The core
Speaker 2: allegation was basically that these platforms were training their AI
Speaker 2: models on millions of copyrighted songs without any permission or
Speaker 2: licensing deals in place to do so. So the idea
Speaker 2: being that these platforms are kind of profiting off other artists'
Speaker 2: work without giving them their dues.
Speaker 1: What kind of evidence did the Big Three present?
Speaker 2: So Universal alleged that multiple AI generated songs on Udio
Speaker 2: closely resembled their classics. It gave many examples, including a
Speaker 2: song that had a very similar melody and chord progression
Speaker 2: to the Temptations nineteen sixty four hit My Girl Now.
Speaker 2: Udio generated a song that was very similar to My
Speaker 2: Girl based on the prompt My Tempting nineteen sixty four girl,
Speaker 2: Smokey sing Hitsville soul pop.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 2: Yes, UMG pointed to other examples that sounded very similar
Speaker 2: to classic hits like My Way as performed by Frank Sinatra,
Speaker 2: Abbas Dancing Queen, and even Christmas classics like Rocking around
Speaker 2: the Christmas Tree. So the labels argued that for Udio
Speaker 2: specifically to create music that sounded this similar to existing songs,
Speaker 2: it must have trained its model on copyrighted recordings. Then,
Speaker 2: the record labels later amended the lawsuit to also include
Speaker 2: allegations that Udio sourced music through the illegal scraping of
Speaker 2: copyrighted recordings from YouTube as well.
Speaker 1: Okay, right, So then how did Udio respond to these allegations.
Speaker 2: It argued that it hadn't broken any laws and that
Speaker 2: it uses quote state of the art filters to ensure
Speaker 2: it does not reproduce copyrighted works or artists' voices. The
Speaker 2: company claims its music generator was trained using publicly available music. Okay,
Speaker 2: and this has started a really interesting conversation about fair use.
Speaker 2: So it said its actions constituted fair use under US
Speaker 2: copyright law. Which is a legal concept that basically allows
Speaker 2: a limited use of some copyrighted material without permission in
Speaker 2: certain circumstances. It's quite vague, but an example of fair
Speaker 2: use might be if we hear on the podcast we're
Speaker 2: talking about a story relating to a popular song, and
Speaker 2: we played, you know, five seconds of that song to
Speaker 2: set the scene, that would be considered fair use. Udio said, quote,
Speaker 2: we stand behind our technology and believe that generative AI
Speaker 2: will become a mainstay of modern society.
Speaker 1: That's interesting that they said publicly available. They didn't say
Speaker 1: royalty free, they didn't say like copyright free. They just
Speaker 1: said publicly available, which I guess you could say. YouTube
Speaker 1: is a platform that doesn't require you to sign in,
Speaker 1: so you could kind of argue this is publicly available.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a very interesting kind of rabbit hole of what
Speaker 2: that really means.
Speaker 1: So then how do we get from there this kind
Speaker 1: of legal standoff to a business partnership.
Speaker 2: We now know that the two companies had actually been
Speaker 2: in talks behind the scenes for several months while these
Speaker 2: ongoing legal proceedings were in the background, and it all
Speaker 2: came to a head last week when Udio and Universal
Speaker 2: confirmed they had reached a compensatory legal settlement, but it
Speaker 2: didn't stop there, because the companies announced that they're now
Speaker 2: partnering to build an entirely new AI music platform together,
Speaker 2: which is set to launch in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: What do we know about this platform?
Speaker 2: According to a joint statement from both companies, it's going
Speaker 2: to be powered by Generative AI, trained on authorized and
Speaker 2: licensed music, and the company said a new subscription service
Speaker 2: will be involved, so users will pay subscribe to kind
Speaker 2: of use the platform that is based off accessing this
Speaker 2: licensed music, which the statement said will quote transform the
Speaker 2: user engagement experience, creating a licensed and protected environment to
Speaker 2: customize and share music responsibly on the Udio platform. A
Speaker 2: crucial difference from the old Udio is that this platform
Speaker 2: will only work with music from artists who have opted
Speaker 2: into it, who have given their permission explicitly.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, so that's the big difference. It's not taking
Speaker 1: things from YouTube. It's saying, I, an artist, choose to
Speaker 1: allow this AI platform to use my songs to come
Speaker 1: up with new material.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I mean that's what Universal says, That's what
Speaker 2: Udio says. They're framing it as this kind of further
Speaker 2: revenue opportunity for UMG artists and songwriters. But in terms
Speaker 2: of what it actually looks like, there's a lot that
Speaker 2: we don't know. It could mean, and it likely will
Speaker 2: mean that udio users can generate AI songs using the
Speaker 2: actual voices of well known artists. The CEO of UDO,
Speaker 2: a guy called Andrew Sanchez. He told Rolling Stone, quote,
Speaker 2: we want to build a community of super fans around creation.
Speaker 2: You'll be able to consume and interact with your favorite
Speaker 2: songs and artists in the same place, adding I might
Speaker 2: want to listen to songs that are made by my
Speaker 2: favorite band, and then maybe I want to remix one.
Speaker 2: He called it a massive expansion, a paradigm that doesn't
Speaker 2: exist right now.
Speaker 1: So these artists, these songwriters, they're opting in to this platform,
Speaker 1: are they going to get paid for that use?
Speaker 2: Well, that is what Universal says. It says there will
Speaker 2: be revenue opportunities for artists that opt in. It looks
Speaker 2: like they will be compensated in two ways, So when
Speaker 2: their music is used to train the AI model, and
Speaker 2: also when their music is used in the platform's outputs.
Speaker 2: So if a song uses the voice of an artist
Speaker 2: or sounds like an artist because it's trained on their songs,
Speaker 2: they're kind of product of that will include some kind
Speaker 2: of compensation for artists. We don't know a great deal
Speaker 2: about how much money will be in it for the artists,
Speaker 2: but we also know that there is this bigger compensation
Speaker 2: deal that has been reached between UMG and Udio. The
Speaker 2: exact figure of what Udio has agreed to pay Universal, though,
Speaker 2: has not been made public.
Speaker 1: All of these changes, though, are still in the future.
Speaker 1: I assume what happens to Udio in interim.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, the platform has already been updated since
Speaker 2: this deal was announced so that users can still create
Speaker 2: AI generated songs and stream within Udio, but they can
Speaker 2: no longer download tracks or share them on other platforms
Speaker 2: like Spotify or Apple Music or YouTube, which was an
Speaker 2: early challenge of AI soong generation that you know, people
Speaker 2: were making music that sounded a lot like the artists
Speaker 2: we know and listen to on a regular basis, sharing
Speaker 2: them elsewhere, but them being you know, not the real deal,
Speaker 2: and they're being lost revenue for those artists. But as
Speaker 2: I mentioned, as soon as this deal was announced last week,
Speaker 2: Udio immediately disabled all downloads from its platform.
Speaker 1: Speaking of those artists. What have we heard from singers
Speaker 1: and songwriters so far?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the response within the music industry has been pretty mixed.
Speaker 2: Some see it as a positive step forward, others have
Speaker 2: raised serious concerns. The Music Artists Coalition, which represents recording artists,
Speaker 2: released a statement raising questions around the deal, and they
Speaker 2: are asking for more transparency around some key issues, you know,
Speaker 2: things like how much settlement money was paid, where will
Speaker 2: this money go, how will revenue be split, and how
Speaker 2: will artists work actually be used in practice if they
Speaker 2: give consent to Udio. Then we've got us based not
Speaker 2: for profit, the Copyright Alliance. It represents over two million
Speaker 2: artists and creatives and has actually welcomed the deal. It
Speaker 2: said this will create a new, responsibly trained, generative AI
Speaker 2: music service.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: This news isn't just a win for UMG and for
Speaker 2: its artists and songwriters, it's a win for everyone in
Speaker 2: the copyright community. It reaffirms that generative AI products should
Speaker 2: and can be crafted responsibly and with respect for copyright owners.
Speaker 2: So that was from the Copyright Alliance.
Speaker 1: Now I am assuming this has resolved and Udio's legal battle,
Speaker 1: But what about the other two in the big three
Speaker 1: that you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2: Yes, Sony and Warner are still actively pursuing this lawsuit
Speaker 2: with Udio, so the platform is still being sued by
Speaker 2: two of the three big players. But the UMG deal
Speaker 2: really could mark a turning point for AI and music.
Speaker 2: You know, we could see potentially Sony and Warner follow
Speaker 2: suit and strike similar licensing deals. But there are some
Speaker 2: big questions that remain, you know, like the question around
Speaker 2: what is fair use. Can AI companies legally train their
Speaker 2: models on copyrighted music without authorization? We have no answer
Speaker 2: to that. If the Sony and Warner lawsuits proceed, it
Speaker 2: will be you know, really interesting to see what a
Speaker 2: judge thinks about that. And you know, how the UMG
Speaker 2: approved Udio platform of the future is going to work
Speaker 2: in practice for artists and users is a massive question mark.
Speaker 2: Whatever happens next, though, Lucy, it's clear this is a
Speaker 2: deal that's going to shape how the music industry approaches
Speaker 2: AI going forward, and we'll keep a close eye on it.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for explaining that to us, and what
Speaker 1: Thanks Lucy, and thank you for joining us today on
Speaker 1: the Daily Odds. We'll be back this evening with the headlines.
Speaker 1: Until then, have a great day. My name is Lily
Speaker 1: Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Kalkudin woman from
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