Musicians fight uphill battle as AI infiltrates streaming platforms, cutting into royalties

Musicians are calling for regulations and finding creative ways to fight back as AI “bands” climb the charts on streaming platforms, soaking up already meagre royalty payments.

But as a major musicians’ union works for legal change, a copyright expert says the law is failing to keep up with artificial intelligence. This comes as an act called The Velvet Sundown has hit 1.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify after stirring controversy over its use of AI, sparking conversations about the future of the music business.

“It’s obviously a challenge in the industry,” Allistair Elliott, director of Canadians affairs for the American Federation of Musicians, which represents 70,000 professional musicians in the U.S. and Canada, told CBC News.

“Same as everything else, the technology gets created and gets used before there’s any guardrails or policies in place to protect musicians.”

Elliott said musicians should have to provide consent for their work to be used to train AI learning models, and they should be compensated if they do consent.

He said he hopes to see the federal government step up with policies and legislation but acknowledges that a “careful balance” needs to be struck between the advancement of technology and the protection of creators.

If that doesn’t happen, Elliott said, he worries the technology could “eradicate” a generation of creative workers.

“The frustration, I think, for creators is governments tend not to move very quickly,” he said.

While AI can’t compete for the live music market — at least not yet — Elliott said there are a lot of musicians who only make recorded music, be it for television, movies or commercial jingles, whose livelihoods will be directly affected by AI.

CBC News reached out to the Department of Canadian Heritage, but late Friday it said it wasn’t yet ready to comment.

‘Pick a real guitar to play’

Kristian Heironimus, a Florida-based musician who records and tours under the name Velvet Meadow, was miffed to see The Velvet Sundown amass such a huge following when it seemed elements of the name and imagery were eerily similar to his own.

“It’s definitely disheartening,” he said in an interview.

But instead of getting down about it, the multi-instrumentalist set to work tracking guitar, bass, drums and vocals on a fuzzy, garage-rock inspired “diss track” called The Velvet Sundown, released July 1.

“Pick a real guitar to play, not damn mouse,” Heironimus sings. “Cut your teeth just like me, and all the artists whose fingers bleed.”

Without using artificial intelligence, Heironimus is challenging The Velvet Sundown at its own game, effectively “memeing” the AI band and using its name to push his own song into the algorithm.

“As artists, we just have to outperform [AI] the best we can,” he said.

“I think we’re going to be in for kind of a new wave of sound, because I feel like there’s going to be a lot of artists who will be chasing something truly unique to get away from that sphere of AI music as it takes over. I’m optimistic about it.”

On the heels of the Velvet Sundown controversy, India’s Collective Media Network launched an AI-generated “spiritual” rock band called Trilok this week, along with videos explaining each of the AI-generated band members’ personas, in the latest sign that AI music is going mainstream.

And in France, streaming platform Deezer said in April that 18 per cent of its uploaded songs — about 20,000 a day — are fully generated by AI. Other major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple don’t track those numbers or label AI-generated music.

Artists unlikely to get fair deal: musician

New York-based pop musician and vlogger Hadji Gaviota, who discussed the recent controversies in a video called Spotify’s Fake AI Band Problem, said musicians have long known they can’t rely on streaming services to make a living.

But because Spotify’s royalties are distributed based on a percentage of the company’s overall revenue, the influx of AI acts means real musicians are now getting an even smaller slice of the pie.

“You need to figure out how to make that money somewhere else,” Gaviota said. “It’s been clear, but it’s only clearer now.”

The rising use of generative AI in creative industries has triggered a wave of lawsuits, with artists, authors and rights holders accusing AI firms of using copyrighted material without consent or compensation to train their models.

AI music tools Suno and Udio are each facing legal action from Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music, which have accused the startups of mass copyright infringement for allegedly training AI systems on their recordings.

Gaviota said he has little faith in record labels to fight for artists, noting they’re seeking equity in Suno and Udio as part of their lawsuits.

He said he’s hopeful about developments in attribution technology, which aims to pick apart the songs used to train AI models in order to credit and compensate artists, though he expects any compensation would likely amount to “fractions of pennies.”

“Artists getting a fair deal is usually like the last part of anything,” Gaviota said. “I wouldn’t put my eggs in that basket.”

AI regulation talk ‘going in circles’

Mira Sundara Rajan, a visiting professor at the University of California, Davis, law school and former Canada research chair in intellectual property law at the University of British Columbia, said talks about regulating AI have been “going in circles” for more than two years in Canada and globally.

Many in the legal community don’t want to appear critical of AI, out of a “knee-jerk fear” of being branded as Luddites, she told CBC News.

Legal frameworks are in place around intellectual property, but Sundara Rajan said it’s hard to stretch existing laws to cover AI.

“Because legal actions tend to be very precise for obvious reasons, you don’t have catch-all legal provisions,” she said.

Sundara Rajan, who is also a classical pianist, tackles these topics in her recent book, The Moral Rights of Authors and Artists: From the Birth of Copyright to the Age of Artificial Intelligence. She said there’s been debate in the world of intellectual property law about whether scraping artists’ music for AI is “fair use,” as it’s called in the U.S., or “fair dealing” in Canada.

She argues it falls short in both cases.

“I think, on any reasonable understanding of copyright law as it stands today, this is not fair use in the United States, and it’s definitely not fair dealing in Canada,” she said.

Sundara Rajan said large technology companies, by way of lobbying, have a heavy sway in how their products are regulated — and whatever happens in the U.S. is often followed by Canada and other countries.

She cites Canada’s recent scrapping of the digital services tax as an example of that.

“It’s a total vicious-cycle situation,” she said. “The sad thing for me is that two constituencies that I really care about end up losing out — one being the artist and the other being the public — because they’re not in a position to do a lot, they don’t have the lobby power.”