A Swedish organization that collects royalties on behalf of songwriters and record companies has formed a technology-legal-business ecosystem designed to allow AI developers to use music legally while compensating publishers of recordings and compositions.
What’s new: STIM, which collects royalties on behalf of over 100,000 composers and recording artists, devised a license for use of musical works to train AI models. Sureel, a Swedish startup, provides technology that calculates the influence of a given training example on a model’s output. The music-generation startup Songfox is the first licensee.
How it works: STIM considers its deal with Songfox a pilot project that will shape future licensing arrangements. Members of the organization can license their music if they (i) opt in to allowing AI developers to use it and (ii) distribute it via STIM’s music-by-subscription subsidiary Cora Music.
- STIM members must register their works with Sureel. Registration forbids AI developers from training models on those works by default. To license registered works, publishers must opt in and developers must agree to the terms.
- The license grants licensees — typically AI companies that seek to train a music generator on licensed works — the right to copy recordings and their underlying compositions for the purpose of training one version of a model. Further licenses are required for further versions. Licensees can distribute generated music via subscription services, but they must obtain separate licenses for television, radio, advertising, or films.
- Sureel uses proprietary technology to determine the influence of a given work on a given generated output. The technology, which must be integrated with a model during training, learns “static attribution vectors” that help determine a percentage of influence on the model’s output of any given training example, according to a patent.
- When an AI developer uses licensed works, the rights holders will divide a licensing fee based on the number of their works used, the size of the AI developer’s business, and other factors. They will also receive unspecified shares of revenue from the uses of the AI model and the generated music. (The license is new enough that no concrete examples of such payments are available.)
Yes, but: To take advantage of the license, AI developers must integrate Sureel’s attribution technology into their model training process. Consequently, the STIM license is not useful for artists that aim to collect revenue from music-generation companies such as Suno and Udio, which trained their models without Sureel’s involvement.
Behind the news: Owners of copyrights to creative works have sued AI companies for training models on their works without permission, but the likely outcomes of such lawsuits are uncertain.
- Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music — the world’s three largest music companies — are pursuing a lawsuit against Suno and Udio, makers of web-based music generators, for alleged copyright violations. Similarly, the German music-rights organization GEMA is suing Suno.
- Laws in the United States do not address whether or not the training an AI model on a copyrighted work requires the copyright owner’s permission. This leaves the question to be decided by courts or further action by lawmakers.
- Europe’s AI Act provides for artists to make their works unavailable for training AI systems, but music-industry organizations say this provision doesn’t work, and artists have no redress if their works were used to train AI systems before the AI Act took effect.
Why it matters: It remains to be seen whether allowing AI models to learn from copyrighted works is considered fair use under the laws of many countries. Regardless, the current uncertainly over the interpretation of existing laws opens AI companies to potential liability for claims that they have infringed copyrights. Licensing could help to insulate AI developers from legal risk and incentivize creative people to continue to produce fresh works on which to train next-generation models. The STIM license is an early effort to find a formula that works for both parties.
We’re thinking: As technology has evolved from recording to broadcast to streaming, the avenues for musicians to profit from their work have increased, and we expect AI to continue to expand the options.