Madonna Does Not Want Her Music Trained On By AI
In a Nutshell
Madonna explicitly refuses to have her music used for AI training, regardless of payment offered. AI music companies like Suno have reached $5 billion valuations by training on artists' work without compensation or consent, generating more music every two weeks than exists on Spotify. Fair use loopholes and workarounds exist to bypass copyright restrictions, and existing platforms like Spotify should implement opt-in systems with payments rather than relying on unauthorized training data.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
AI and music content is exciting because so many people are experimenting with writing songs for the first time, writing beats, and creating sounds for the first time. However, companies valued at billions of dollars are built on top of other people's music where not one artist has ever gotten paid a dollar. This is not okay.
Suno is now at a $5 billion valuation and next thing it will be at a $10 billion valuation, all built off the world's music, yet not one music artist has gotten a dollar. The speaker has met with Mikey, who runs Suno, many times. The hope is that Mikey does the right thing and fixes this by creating a system that allows artists to opt in or opt out. If artists opt in, there needs to be a way to pay them. The speaker is opting out and does not want their music used to build the business.
Every 2 weeks, more music is made on AI than all of the music that's on Spotify today. While this inspires people and allows them to create songs, businesses should not be built using music without getting the rights first.
When Napster first started, the speaker met with Shawn because it was exciting to see people downloading music, but it was illegal. The hope was they would crack the code on how to turn this into a system where artists get paid, but before that could happen, Napster got shut down. Daniel Ek in Stockholm built Spotify and figured out that people would pay for music if given access to all the music in the world without having to piece it together or illegally download songs that might be corrupt. People have paid for it through streaming, which is now the core where money is coming in to music artists.
Fair use is not fair. When asked to create a song that sounds like Metallica, the AI will say it cannot serve up any copyrighted music. However, if you misspell it as "Moralica," it will serve up music that looks like it was trained on Metallica. There are a lot of workarounds. The AI will tell you that you cannot type in "Madonna," but you can describe Madonna. In discovery, it will be found that all of this music is in there, and that is not okay.
The question is posed: what's wrong with paying artists? Why not figure out a way to do it? Sit down with a team, figure out how to pay music artists if you're going to train on their music. Claude and ChatGPT might become interfaces to everything, like the App Store or WeChat in China, where if you want to do anything including make a song, there are few interfaces. These companies like OpenAI and Anthropic could gatekeep and incentivize companies like Suno to reimburse artists. However, Claude or ChatGPT probably won't carry AI-generated music because it has so many lawsuits involved and it's not worth taking on that responsibility.
Madonna does not want her music trained on. She does not care what they want to pay her. She is very clear that she does not want her music to be trained on. She wants her music to be its own thing. Companies should take her off if she opts out. The speaker has been trying to figure this out for the last few years. Sam at one point really wanted to figure this out too and dedicated time to try and figure out if there was a music thing to do and how to do it in a way that supported artists.
Someone might come along, if not Suno, someone from behind like a next generation Spotify, and figure out how to do it. Spotify can do it.
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