The study concluded that under current regulatory frameworks in most countries, creators stand to lose on two fronts. Unauthorised use of their works by generative AI models will eat into remuneration earned through copyright, while at the same time work opportunities will shrink as AI-generated outputs become more competitive against human-made works.The report predicted that by 2028, exponential growth in generative AI music would account for about 20% of traditional music streaming platforms’ revenues, and about 60% of music libraries’ revenues.AI developers and providers in the music industry stand to gain €4bn (up from €0.1bn in 2023) while developers and providers in the audiovisual sector stand to gain €5bn over the same period.It will be revenue “derived directly from the unlicensed reproduction of creators’ works, representing a transfer of economic value from creators to AI companies”, the report warned.
Reports like these are actually written mostly to benefit governments (who provided the grants to fund their production). They provide governments the opportunity to do something:
“We must ensure strong protections for their work, especially Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, so that AI platforms respect protocols and enhances rather than exploits First Nations culture. The Australian and New Zealand governments need to take the lead and act decisively to protect the livelihoods of creators and the future of our creative industries.”
That's just blather, of course--and poor grammar. The real truth is that music, as an art form, is not actually an industrial "sector" because it is not actually a commercial product. Of course the music business consists entirely of commercial product, that's why it's a business, but that has little to do with music as an art. If you are a creative artist working to create music, your should not expect to have remuneration or earnings or income from copyright or work opportunities. Because you are not producing a marketable commodity. Whew. That's a relief.
Our non-commercial envoi of the day: Carlo Gesualdo, Moro lasso
18 comments:
Jim Handloser
Sorry, dunno what went wrong--this is the comment I was attempting to post:
Cris de coeur based on a false premise resulting in government fiats. What could go wrong?
8>)
Jim, I know this is an extreme view and most musicians just want to find a way to survive, but I had to leave the business because I couldn't stand the business aspects. For me, music has never been a commercial product.
You say that music creators "are not producing a marketable commodity." Is this a normative or descriptive claim? Since the Beatles produced a (highly) marketable product, it cannot be descriptive, so I have to assume you mean the former. So are saying that, in an ideal world, the Beatles should not have been paid for their music?
Sorry, I am just trying to understand your point.
No, that's a very good question. And it does get us into some tricky issues. First of all, yes, the Beatles created some fine music and were well paid for it. But the whole environment has seen enormous changes since 1970. I guess my point has to do with the nature of musical quality and the nature of commercial music and the considerable differences between them. To put it bluntly, I have considerable doubt that the pop music of today is anything other than a commercial commodity.
I couldn't agree more. Taylor Swift's music is so bad I bet a well-trained LLM can produce "better" songs.
I was amused to read a lengthy newspaper article about her Eras tour that, while praising everything about her, failed to mention that all the "performances" were lip-synced. I have to confess that I have tried on several occasions to listen to Taylor Swift but I usually don't get past the one-minute mark out of sheer boredom.
What is a "music worker?" Is that a musician or a composer or an usher in the concert hall? I had never thought of such a category until reading this article. It seems to mean composers and other musicians, so why not just call them musicians? "Workers" are normally employees whose product is anonymous and property of their employer, sold as a commodity rather than as unique art.
Regarding musicians' loss of income due to "unauthorized use of their works by generative AI eating into remuneration earned through copyright," I think this is literally untrue in the sense that the pre-existing copyright revenue stream will still flow but rather the AI will evade paying copyright licenses and royalties so there will not be an increase in that revenue. Unless the "AI-generated outputs" then literally displace sales of real human-generated music, in which case the revenue stream to musicians has indeed been reduced from what it would have been.
But who is spending money on music that is made by AI? Advertisers? Movie and game soundtracks? I don't know, but I don't think I'll ever pay for "AI-generated outputs" for my listening. I can't imagine such computer-generated "music" will be interesting or satisfying to me. Perhaps most human-generated music is also not interesting or satisfying to me. In my youth I spent a lot of money on Grateful Dead and other rock concert tickets, and until a few years ago I still bought tickets for Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. I still buy their CDs as they come out (both are still recording new stuff!), and I have virtually every commercial CD they've released (along with 24 linear feet of GD bootlegs on skinny CD-R discs, and another 15 linear feet of Bob Dylan bootlegs on skinny CD-Rs). My spending on CDs used to be $50-100 monthly (mostly classical and early music these past few decades) but that has also virtually stopped because I pay $17 monthly to Spotify (for 2 accounts, my son is on that bill too) and they have virtually every rock album I never had (and most of the ones I do have) plus lots more early music and classical than I could ever collect in CD. Not to mention my 6,000+ CDs cover several walls where I built CD racks into those walls that perhaps could be better covered with more built-in book cases that would make possible getting the rest of my books out of the boxes in my parents' attic and onto shelves where just the titles on the spines would trigger memory of mental places I haven't visited in decades.
I don't know how musicians get paid. My listening is mostly of music composed by virtuosos who were employed as household musicians of rich merchants or aristocrats of the 16th and 17th centuries, or by bishops and cathedrals in a wider timeframe. No doubt I will patronize living musicians when I hit the Powerball jackpot, unlike the vulgar new money billionaires who don't show any signs of taste or tradition. Meanwhile the Yale symphonies are very cheap, as is the Cheshire Symphony, a community orchestra with $20 tickets. So I don't think any musicians are getting much money out of me, though they're probably getting even less out of my family and co-workers, who use the free version of streaming apps and take the commercials and algorithm playlists. Maybe "AI-generated outputs" will soon push the human musicians out of those streams. I select my albums carefully.
Ha! The computer published me as anonymous. I didn't notice the sign-in option until after I sent it. Oh well, you know who I am!
Yes, Will, I know that's you commenting. When I see the phrase "music workers" I immediately think of "sex workers." Yes, the total commodification of music has turned it into a mere category of industrial manufacture. With "workers" not artists. This is why I suggested that a real musician is not actually producing a marketable commodity, but something else. An artwork.
Right Bryan, real musicians are producing unique art. I guess the recording industry commodified that in recordings, a relatively new revenue stream only a century old. Formerly, if you wanted to hear music, you'd have to make it yourself or someone in your presence would have to make it. Ordinary people needed front porch musicians and in their living rooms were pianos. But then mass distribution of recordings and mass media starting with radio changed music from an immediate "live" in-person activity that was communally experienced (when performed for an audience). This brought to the fore the most skilled and refined artists, and intimidated and embarrassed the rest of us so much that making music was no longer a common pursuit of ordinary people, and "success" mostly meant becoming a high-paid celebrity, a "star." But I guess that, outside the church and aristocratic circles where fine musicians were well paid by their patrons, the rise of professional musicians to popular stardom began in the 18th century, as concert halls were built for ticket-buying audiences of the rising middle class who were too numerous and "low" to be invited to the palaces and mansions where good music had traditionally been made. All of which crowded out the lovely viols and lutes and harpsichords that couldn't be heard in these cavernous and crowded new venues, bringing forward the violins and pianofortes and other louder instruments, tuned ever-higher to be heard in the big crowded spaces. Stars were born with these ticket sales for big concerts, including opera when this concert culture was at its apex.
Will, that's a good summary of the history--with one quibble: I don't think they started building concert halls for the middle class until the early 19th century. What has happened is that there has been an ever-accelerating shift from music as an art form to music as a commercial commodity. The interesting thing is that there is still a complex mixture of fine art and mechanical thumping in music today. Even popular musicians like Rick Beato retain sensitivity to real music--witness his tribute videos to Bach and piano virtuosos Martha Argerich and Yuja Wang. And there is a slow infusion of some pop culture into classical music. Some "minimalist" music trends toward pop rhythms and the Danish String Quartet did an album of folk music. But if you look at the economics of it, since the 1960s the pop world has dwarfed the classical world in earnings.
Because of the mass audience for popular music, no patrons are needed, but for classical and related schooled-musics, it seems, it seems it would be increasingly difficult to get paid enough to stay full-time professional (as you've written about previously). Wealthy benefactors must subsidize orchestras and opera companies, and it may be their tastes are changing as the variety of recorded music genres and perhaps the globalization (I use the term in its most expansive connotations here) of culture accelerates. This makes "classical " a smaller niche in the whole. Simultaneously there is a leftward cultural trend against "elite" music, both politically from the same impulses as DEI and other academic "decolonializations" such that music school administrators and maybe moreso their incoming students are shifting away from the finest musical traditions of our civilization. I am a bit speculative here because I'm not qualified to survey trends in academic music curricula, and I further hedge that analysis by observing my narrow (but real) familiarity with the composition coming from Yale students and faculty as , broadly speaking, non-traditional even while not being towards pop. Just stuff often without melody or immediately obvious order, requiring full attention and not at all easy listening. Maybe not literally comparable to Schoenberg, but of comparable nihilism towards trading, tempered of course by an intimate awareness of traditional music.
Will, what do you mean by "comparable nihilism towards trading"?
Tradition, not trading!
Ah, that makes more sense! But I think I would disagree with you about Schoenberg's relation to tradition. He believed that what he did was simply an extension of tradition in the only logical direction.
Not that I'm an expert in the area, but it seems to be a trend and economically viable to deliberately create problems in order to find the solutions. In this way additional sectors and jobs are created, a government's policies seem rational and "forward thinking" and the illusion of progress is maintained.
As for AI, we need to emphasise that the "A" literally means "artificial". But even now it can be difficult to distinguish between human and non-human productivity (i.e. deep fakes) and I fear it will undoubtedly become catastrophically worse in the years to come. I've always thought it a general rule that prevention is better than the cure, but it seems corporations are willingly going down the rabbit hole and it will lead us to some nasty places legally, culturally, morally, etc etc etc.
Your first paragraph is an excellent summary of what "progressive" governments have been doing--Canada is a good example. They have been creating problems and in order to solve these largely fictitious problems they have increased the federal government employees by about 40% over the last several years with bloated budgets as a result, that have to be paid for with increased taxes. The creative invention of governments with regard to more and more ingenious taxes is really remarkable. The result of all this is sclerotic economic growth to the point that Canada's richest province, Ontario, now has a per capita GDP lower than that of the poorest state in the US, Mississippi. That is certainly an illusory progress. But government and all its multitudinous employees are quite happy, of course.
Not sure I have any sound opinions on AI yet except I would question the "intelligence" part. There is no reasoning involved.
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