TestifyGPT, The Last Recording Artist, The Weeknd, Cigarette Songs, Jack Harlow, Boldy... @MusicREDEF

quote of the day

There's nothing better than hearing something catchy. You're walking on the street later and you're like, 'Oh no!' That's when you're doing your job—where you've made something that is just so infectious that it's burrowed itself into someone's subconscious. So they start singing it when they're cooking, later. You know?

Hannah Jadagu, whose debut album, "Aperture," is out Friday on Sub Pop

music

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ThoughtExchange

There are plenty of good reasons to lose sleep over artificial intelligence—the future of news, the future of information, the future of your livelihood, the future of civilization. But this is a music newsletter, so we’re here to suggest you focus your anxiety on all the things that relate to that and to single out the work of US SEN. MARSHA BLACKBURN, who used her one-on-one time with OpenAI CEO SAM ALTMAN at Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on AI oversight and regulation to cut right to the musical chase: How can artists and songwriters be protected from being remixed, remade and replaced by AI, and how does the AI industry intend to pay them?

The history of music tech startups, as you’re no doubt aware if you’re reading this newsletter, is the history of companies disrupting the market today and worrying about how to license and pay for it tomorrow. To his credit, Altman, whose company is behind the viral AI tool ChatGPT, said at Tuesday’s hearing that the company is “talking to artists and content owners about what they want,” and “very clearly, no matter what the law is, the right thing to do is to make sure people get significant upside benefit from this new technology.” To his, let’s say, debit, Altman didn’t say who those artists and content owners are or what exactly he and they are talking about. There are “a lot of different opinions, unfortunately,” he offered.

So, “How do you compensate the artist?,” the Republican senator from the great music state of Tennessee asked, cutting the CEO off to try to get him to get to the point. When he didn’t quite answer, she asked if a SOUNDEXCHANGE-like model might work, and Altman said he’d never heard of the nonprofit responsible for collecting and distributing artist royalties from satellite and internet radio.

Wrong answer. The senator wagged her left index finger at the 38-year-old CEO—he's only five years old than TAYLOR SWIFT and three years older than RIHANNA—and said, “OK, you’ve got your team behind you. Get back to me on that.”

You're within your rights to be skeptical that anyone will get back to anyone on that in a productive, artist-benefiting manner. But I’m prepared to hold onto some optimism. Washington is broken but Republicans and Democrats from music-producing states including Tennessee, California and New York have demonstrated they can work together and make progress when it comes to protecting their creative constituents. Maybe ChatGPT can train itself on *that* knowledge and come up with the right answer soon enough.

Etc Etc Etc

Elsewhere in the artificial musicverse, Billboard reports the three major labels are working with SPOTIFY, APPLE and AMAZON on creating protocols that would allow them to issue takedown notices for AI soundalikes, based not on copyright but on the right of publicity... Slate’s HI-PHI NATION podcast stages a battle of the guitar solos between an AI guitarist and two humans... Who owns WARNER MUSIC?... The VILLAGE PEOPLE are going after DONALD TRUMP yet again, this time over a viral video of people dancing to “MACHO MAN” at Mar-A-Lago... On its fourth try, Utah’s LITTLE MOON wins NPR Music’s TINY DESK CONTEST.

Rest in Peace

Scottish session bassist JOHN GIBLIN, who played with Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and countless others.

Matty Karas, curator

May 17, 2023