Universal Partners With AI Startup Udio After Settling Copyright Suit 8
Universal Music Group has settled its copyright lawsuit with AI music startup Udio and struck a licensing deal to launch a new AI-powered music platform next year. The Verge reports: The deal includes some form of compensation and "will provide further revenue opportunities for UMG artists and songwriters," Universal says. Udio, the company behind "BBL Drizzy," will launch the platform as a subscription service next year. Universal, alongside other industry giants Sony and Warner, sued Udio and another startup Suno for "en masse" copyright infringement last year.
Universal -- whose roster includes some of the world's biggest performers like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and Ariana Grande -- says the new tool will "transform the user engagement experience" and let creators customize, stream, and share music. There's no indication of how much it will cost yet. Udio's existing music maker, which lets you create new songs with a few words, will remain available during the transition, though content will be held "within a walled garden" and security measures like fingerprinting will be added.
Universal -- whose roster includes some of the world's biggest performers like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and Ariana Grande -- says the new tool will "transform the user engagement experience" and let creators customize, stream, and share music. There's no indication of how much it will cost yet. Udio's existing music maker, which lets you create new songs with a few words, will remain available during the transition, though content will be held "within a walled garden" and security measures like fingerprinting will be added.
Segregating Slop (Score:2)
We can hope that having a dedicated site for slop would mean less of it on platforms for real music.
But the slopsters will only stay there if there's cash - meaning subscribers. And that, unfortunately, seems to be the hardest thing for AI to manifest.
Users already super happy (Score:2)
The losers are the users (Score:2)
Udio instantly disabled downloads and changed the terms that users no longer own their content. In the end, users can now produce content for Udio and UMG, who have the right to use it commercially. Of course the users still need to pay for that right.
That said, as long as AI content is not copyrighted it is a technical thing, this means instead of wav users can only download 192 kbit/s mp3 now but may still be allowed to use it, not from udio side, but from the side of copyright law, which means udio can't
Re: (Score:2)
We probably should have predicted this. The big labels are just as bad for musicians as the tech bros have ever been. The fact Spotify continues to massively underpay and continue to act hostile to musicians is because of the deals they have with big labels. My Itunes and CD sales where utterly tanked by spotify, almost overnight, but the big stars are making comfortable livings off it.
That they decided to partner with the AI techbros instead of destroying them like they should have is a testament to the fa
Re: (Score:2)
Be an indie musician, have more freedom, get all the money, but don't get noticed. Also Spotify has the huge advantage of centralization for the user. Look into the video streaming market, way too fragmented that a subscription would be worth it, when you only find a small fraction of the content you wanted to subscribe to and would need at least two other subscriptions to get the catalog up to 90%. Centralization is bad for the content producers (if the company wants to exploit them, and look at Spotify ..