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