Transcription
According to Sunno's CEO, Mikey Schulman, most people do not actually enjoy making music because it's hard. As interesting as the comment was, the forum he made it in was just as interesting. Rolling Stone, no. Billboard, no. How about Loudwire? Negative. Oh, no. It was another form where music creators often go to share their creative insights. The 20inut VC podcast. as in venture capitalist. You may have missed it because you were too busy actually making music.
But according to Schulman, a Harvard trained physicist turned billiondoll AI company founder and therefore naturally an expert on how musicians feel about making music. Quote, "It's not really enjoyable to make music now. Takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music. And that is such a good observation. I mean, think about it. The truth is that nobody enjoys running marathons because they're too long. Nobody enjoys going to the gym because weights, they're just too heavy. And nobody enjoys law school because actually bad example.
If you're like the rest of us musicians and you just hate what you do, then I have great news for you. The music industry is doing everything that it can to put you out of your misery. Remember those days and nights you spent trying to get your song lyrics just right? Well, your struggle is over. AI can just write them for you. You know that iconic riff that you've been working on for weeks? No problem. AI's got your back there, too. In fact, the music industry is extremely busy right now trying to remove humans just like you from the creative process entirely.
And who could blame them? I mean, consider this, too. Record labels already own most of the greatest music cataloges ever created. Why should they invest millions of dollars developing the next Michael Jackson, Prince, or Freddy Mercury when they can just keep inventing new ways to monetize the music they already own? By the way, one of those very effective new business models is to just claim the ad revenue on videos on YouTube. I mean, yes, those videos and the ad revenue belong to music educators, and yes, the videos likely qualify as fair use under copyright law, but you know what? Those creators are using famous songs to teach people how to play things like instruments. If those creators don't want to hand over their video earnings to the record labels, they should just get the copyright strikes and be at risk of losing their entire channels and millions of subscribers.
There is, however, one tiny wrinkle in this otherwise flawless plan. Owning music only matters if someone actually owns the music. Meaning owning a piece of music means you can protect your rights to copy and perform and distribute it. And the way that we do that is by getting a copyright registration. But you can only get a copyright registration if your song is human-made. The second that you add AI into the mix, you complicate your ownership and whether you can even get a copyright registration. And if you don't own the copyright registration, your music instantly becomes less valuable.
And it's not like you can hide it either. AI companies are now fingerprinting your music when you use their platforms, which means your music may accidentally be classified as AI music, even if you just use AI in some minimal way. And I'm sure you saw this week, music organizations and activists are all banding together to try to force the music streaming platforms to add AI badges to AI music to show if it is AI generated or AI assisted. So disclosure is really not going to be an option for much longer, which is interesting because apparently we need to know exactly how much of that pesky humanness is left in the music.
And by the way, in manifesting a new music business free from human creators, I don't think we should ever forget about the possible savings to advertisers because of this magical little place called social media. There's no reason to spend millions of dollars anymore sponsoring tours, you know, through, let's say, Live Nation, which PS. Most independent artists will never have the ability to have access to anyway. I mean, look at the emo realer. He's getting millions of views, making hilarious AI parody songs about real estate. Think of the savings of not paying for live music and just getting a shout out in a 30-cond Instagram video.
All of this raises a slightly inconvenient question. In its effort to replace humans in the creative process with AI, the industry may have outsmarted itself. Is it possible that the industry overlooked the small problem about human ownership? And what should the solution be? Well, if you don't like a law and you can afford enough lawyers, the usual solution is to try to have the law changed. Google currently is throwing around its weight to try to just change copyright law rather than allocate any portion of its trillions of dollars to just lawfully license the music that it used to train its AI music platform. LIA, call me a cynic, but I wouldn't be surprised if we suddenly see new bills circulating in Congress to just change copyright law. Not in any way that would actually help creators, let's be clear. And if one of those bills pass, those musicians who are so miserable can find more enjoyable ways to spend their time, like running marathons. I'm top music attorney Miss Crystal.