AI-generated music has emerged as a flashpoint in the ongoing battle between tech companies and intellectual property (IP) holders. While musicians and record labels have accused tech companies of scraping copyrighted songs to train their AI models, some artists are also actively embracing AI as a music-making tool.
Amid this controversy, Musical AI and Beatoven.ai have joined hands to develop a new AI product claimed to be “the world’s first full-song generator that is completely legal and licensed.”
In a partnership announced on Tuesday, December 3, the two startups said that the new service will use AI to generate music while ensuring that the outputs are based on fully licensed tracks and the rightsholders are compensated.
The AI model will be trained on three million songs, loops, samples, and sounds. It is currently under development and will be launched in the second half of 2025.
While the AI song generator will be developed by Beatoven.ai, it will be trained on the existing rightsholders catalogs of Musical AI, an Al training license management and attribution platform. Musical AI will also be responsible for making payments to the rightsholders. Additionally, its enterprise clients will have exclusive access to the AI song generator.
“Based on usage by the outputs provided by Musical AI technology, rightsholders will receive an appropriate share of the model’s revenue, much as they do when music is streamed on a commercial service,” the AI startup said in a press release.
“There are no more excuses for not doing things right and well. We’re proving this with this first-ever service,” said Sean Power, the CEO of Musical AI.
Meanwhile, Beatoven.ai CEO Mansoor Rahimat Khan said that the partnership will “set the way forward for how business models need to be built in AI with the rightsholders being compensated for the data the models are trained on.”
“We have historically been adopting this model in direct partnerships with independent artists and by joining hands with Musical AI we will build a sustainable revenue sharing model using their attribution technology,” he added.
Earlier this year, AI startups Suno and Udio were sued by major record labels such as Sony, Universal Music, Atlantic Records, Warner Bros, Capitol Records, and a few others. The lawsuits alleged that the two companies had committed copyright infringement on an “almost unimaginable scale” and sought a compensation of $150,000 (Rs 1,25,00,000) for every track whose copyright had allegedly been violated.
Content retrieved from: https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/musical-beatoven-ai-song-generator-licensed-legal-9704378/.
