New Music News

This from MBW:

It’s been a big day for those who want action taken against AI-driven fraud and fakery on streaming services.

The headline news: Suno has announced that, starting September 3, it will impose much stricter download restrictions on its subscribers.

Subs to its popular Pro tier, for example, will be limited to 20 downloads per month. At the moment, no such restrictions apply.

Suno first promised that download restrictions were coming as part of its settlement/licensing deal with Warner Music Group last year. (That announcement also said free users would be prevented from downloading on Suno. The new rules don’t quite live up to that, instead restricting free users to seven lifetime downloads.)

Suno stated today that the new restrictions would“make it harder for bad actors to mass-export music”. That could be reassuring for those concerned about Suno’s role in pumping out AI tracks that are then used, via artificial plays, for streaming fraud.

Will it be reassuring enough to attract other large rightsholders to Suno’s stable alongside WMG? We shall see.

Suno, with one eye on a future IPO, surely knows that the road to public legitimacy is painted with ink signatures, squiggled across licensing agreements.

(Sony and Universal, remember, remain locked in litigation against Suno over the latter company’s alleged copyright infringement of their catalogs when training its models.)

Elsewhere today, Spotify has unveiled a new anti-deepfake policy that, from mid-September, will see some artist profiles slapped with an “AI Persona”or “Likely AI Persona” tag.

Spotify says it’ll flag profiles when it detects “photorealistic AI-generated identities”masquerading as real people.

This should go a long way to solving the exact problem I mentioned in yesterday’s MBW newsletter: AI-emboldened impersonators pretending to represent – and fill the libraries of – real-life artists.

This is me. Like MBW says, some of these steps will help to alleviate the imposters that are so prevalent today. Spotify, as always, is slow to pick up on trends and their actions are months late. If Artificial Idiots (AI) make popping out software faster and better, then what took them so long?

And as to Suno, I personally hope they get sued out of existence. Their whole reason for being is to steal an artist’s works so that fraudsters can make a buck selling inferior music. Not that the typical music listener cares, as they’re as unscrupulous as the fraudsters.

As usual, MBW stays on top of issues that affect the music industry, but few articles are pertinent to the indie musicians my blog focuses on.