Creativity, AI Products and Musical Art: The Future of Intellectual Property - CULTURETAP

Who owns your singing voice? From a biological perspective, it is of course you. But from a technological perspective, couldn’t anyone use your voice as you do with the help of artificial intelligence? What about a business perspective? If you, as a singer, sign a record deal, does your label own your voice so long as it’s singing the exact words in the exact formation that it appears as on your record? What about streaming services? How much of a stake will they have in your voice in the future? These are all questions that must be asked when considering the future of intellectual property, particularly as it pertains to music.

A major disclosure: the future of copyright law is something that I am not equipped to talk about exhaustively in this article. It is a world that is vast, complex and perhaps best left to those working in the field of law and politics. However, I am uniquely positioned as a person who simultaneously has little stake in or desire to make music creation my career, but also has a passion for creative industries. Even if I wasn’t, though, would this issue not be relevant to any one person who consumes creative media? Anyone who watches television or movies, who has played a video game, who has read a book, should be at least passively concerned with how the future of intellectual property may affect how the entertainment industry changes what appears on our screens and in our lives. So, from both the consumer and the artist’s perspective, what does this future look like?

Let’s get the bleak stuff out of the way first. As any social sciences/humanities/liberal arts student such as myself would know, capitalistic desires tend to overtake creative licensing and autonomy - this is not even necessarily a prediction, this is just a modern truth. As such, the future of intellectual property and copyright may very well repeat certain cyclical behaviours that the business industry experiences. I am, of course, referring to how music is consumed in a monetary sense. In the past, major music distribution brands such as iTunes had to innovate to find a way to combat piracy - this was especially prevalent in the late 90’s and early 2000’s with programs such as LimeWire and PirateBay (the latter of which still exists today, albeit the site is more focused on audiovisual media such as movies and television rather than music) (Van Der Sar, 2019). Presently, companies such as Spotify and Apple Music have somewhat combatted this issue by offering a recurring fee that gives the consumer access to a large category of music through streaming, making access to music more convenient than piracy. However, consumers seem to be becoming less satisfied with these options since some companies have opted to tack on an additional fee and/or create new, more expensive packages that - with previous iterations of the same product - the consumer would have reaped the benefits of regardless (Ingham, 2023). If this trend continues, I believe that the era of pirating substantial amounts of music may return. This has a number of implications, the most obvious of which being the fact that streaming services will lose money and will look to innovate their business model in some way, perhaps by reverting back to a single-package product with a lower price point. However, the more worrying aspect of this future is how it will impact up and coming artists, as well as artists that have been making music for decades. This age of music piracy would almost certainly cause these artists to not be paid their dues, since a portion of sales to streaming services must go back to the artists as well as producers, record label executives, and other employees. This fact is made even worse when one remembers how much more competitive the music industry has become in the last decade with the advent of at-home music production programs and YouTube. These tools help any person to produce high-quality art from their own home and share their work worldwide, making competition stiff and creating a music scene that is even more difficult to earn a living wage in.

Then comes the great de-equalizer in content creation: artificial intelligence. AI is perhaps the most pervasive and threatening new technology that has been seen in years. Just a few decades ago, home music production (to the level at which it is being conducted, as discussed above) seemed to be a distant, even unlikely possibility. Now, not only can this occur, but it can also be aided by open-source, often free-to-use artificial intelligence tools that are good enough to fool the listener into believing everything they’re hearing is authentically human-made. This is true anecdotally, but also in hard research. Scholars at the University of Southern California conducted a study on how AI-generated music is received by the human ear - specifically, how authentically made it sounded to the test subjects. They found that the “humanlike traits of an AI music generator led it to be accepted as a musician” (Hong et al., pp. 1) and that the test subjects who recognized the AI generator as a “real” musician tended to appreciate the music that it outputted more (pp. 1). However, whether it was autonomous when creating songs did not influence its perception as a genuine musician. Certainly, this points to a future where even if AI was in some way prohibited in major music production, it would be extremely difficult to regulate since its outputs could easily pass for genuine, human-made sound - a somewhat sobering and bleak thought for lesser-known musicians. This might cause some to argue that unless some sort of legislation or regulation is introduced, AI will eventually be creating all of our music. However, in the eyes of others, there is certainly a case to be made for the use of AI in musical art.

The Journal of Public Health published a correspondence that discussed the potential therapeutic applications of AI in music - not to create music that fools the listener into thinking it is by someone that it is not, but rather to curate sound to one’s psychological needs: “By leveraging user preferences, physiological data and contextual information, AI systems can dynamically create music that suits individual needs, enhancing therapeutic outcomes.” (Padillah et al., pp. 810). This was an intriguing notion to me when I first read about it, and it disrupted my previously held view that AI in music is inherently harmful. Furthermore, the article reads: “Certain music genres, such as instrumental music or ambient sounds, can create an optimal environment for enhanced cognitive performance. AI music can help us identify the music types that promote concentration, allowing us to boost our productivity and achieve better work outcomes.” (Padillah et al., pp. 810). When you consider that AI can be applied in manners such as this, in ways more catered to altruism than profitability, the question of getting rid of AI technology in music for good becomes more complex and even less appealing. This is not to say that AI was ever going to go away completely in music anyways, but it is to say that it becomes a more sympathizable being when it is considered in relation to altruism.

If AI really is not going anywhere, that fact raises another question surrounding its use in music: if it is decided that utilizing AI in music creation is not actually all that bad or infringing, how do we categorize it when it comes to receiving accolades? Do we place a song made with this new technology out of the sphere of consideration when it comes to award shows and similar points of recognition? Well, as is the case with any aspect of this investigation, there is no easy answer. However, to get closer to one, it might be useful to consider a recent musical event as a case study. Recently, a song generated and self-released online by a user known as Ghostwriter977 on TikTok went viral, and was even submitted for consideration at next year’s Grammys. However, this song and its Grammy submission were controversial for a very pertinent reason: using AI, Ghostwriter977 used the voices of R&B artists Drake and The Weeknd to make it sound as though they were the ones singing the song (Davis, 2023). While it was soon rejected from the Grammys for not being eligible for consideration (Ghostwriter did not obtain the rights to the singers’ voices, so it was never commercially available, thereby disqualifying it) (Davis, 2023), it prompted questions of what might happen in a situation where an AI song was accepted for Grammy nomination. Personally, I believe that there will be enough simultaneous acceptance and pushback for AI music to persist in public consciousness, but not to be categorized in the same realm as traditionally made music. If we are to use the Grammy example, I believe that new categories of awards will be introduced - as there has always been a “best pop song” award, there will simultaneously be a “best AI-generated pop song” or “best pop song with AI production” award. As such, I believe that AI in music will come to be seen as simply a different mode of creation than traditionally produced music, the same way traditional art still exists in the same width as digital art, for example. However, similar discussions may occur; there may be an ongoing and growing debate as to if AI generated music is “real” or “genuine” art, just as some traditional artists have been contending with digital artists for several years at this point. Again, however, this is only one such possibility out of a myriad of possible futures. It is entirely possible that using AI in music might also disqualify a song from consideration altogether, or that each respective award show/academy/institution will implement their own rules on the matter, creating a norm that is continuously contended with between groups.

In summation, how intellectual property as it relates to music will function in the near or distant future are both incredibly murky and contentious. In particular, artificial intelligence creates a need to change a significant amount of existing legislation surrounding copyright. Since it borrows from a number of different existing musical works, it is difficult to determine if it is truly ethical to continue using it in music and audio, especially considering it has the ability to nearly perfectly recreate the voices of singers at this point in time, let alone how it will improve in the future. Other aspects will disrupt the music industry such as the aforementioned piracy and payment issue, as well as the fact that the music industry will only become more competitive as time goes on.

Note: This article was submitted for WRI470H5F - "Writing Futures" during the 2023-2024 Fall academic term at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

References

Davis, Darreonna. “AI-Generated Drake, The Weeknd Song Not Eligible for Grammy. Here’s How It Could Have Been, Though.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 8 Sept. 2023, www.forbes.com/sites/darreonnadavis/2023/09/08/ai-generated-drake-the-weeknd-song-not-eligible-for-grammy-heres-how-it-could-have-been-though/?sh=62351c1e2321.

Hong, Joo-Wha, et al. “Human, I wrote a song for you: An experiment testing the influence of machines’ attributes on the AI-composed music evaluation.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 131, 2022, pp. 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107239.

Ingham, Tim. “More Music Streaming Price Rises - Now!” Music Business Worldwide, 20 Sept. 2023, www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/music-streaming-price-rises-now/.

Padillah, Raup, et al. “Different music types affect mood, focus and work performance: Exploring the potential of music as therapy with AI Music.” Journal of Public Health, vol. 45, no. 4, Dec. 2023, pp. 810–811, https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdad093

Van Der Sar, Ernesto. “Piracy Highlights of The Decade: From Limewire to IPTV.” TorrentFreak, 2019, www.torrentfreak.com/piracy-highlights-of-the-decade-from-limewire-to-iptv-191230/.