Grimes by Philip Nguyen is licensed under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
Artists are starting to use artificial intelligence in the music scene. Grimes (Claire Boucher), a 35-year-old Canadian electro-pop artist, recently posted plans to "split 50% royalties on any successful AI-generated song that uses my voice." She added, "Same deal as I would with any artist I collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings.penalty."
Grimes said she's in the process of developing a program as well. "We're making a program that should simulate my voice well, but we could also upload stems and samples for ppl to train their own." However, she also didn't mention how this would work but said that profit splits could be sourced from existing super-popular tracks created with her voice.
"I think it's cool to be fused w a machine, and I like the idea of open-sourcing all art and killing copyright." She said in another tweet.
She's not the only one to come up with the idea of using AI tools to create music. Experimental musician Holly Herndon unveiled Holly Plus, her artificial voice model. With this tool, users can upload audio, and it will output a new track in Herndon's voice. However, her decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) members gain profits.
Recently, a music track created by TikTok user ghostwriter877 using The Weeknd and Drake voice models became a hit sensation until it was removed from streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. As the song "Heart on My Sleeve" went viral, Universal Music Group provided a statement saying that AI models being trained on their musicians' work violates the copyright.
"UMG's success has been, in part, due to embracing new technology and putting it to work for our artists–as we have been doing with our own innovation around AI for some time already. With that said, however, the training of generative AI using our artists' music (which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law), as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs, begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation.
These instances demonstrate why platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists. We're encouraged by the engagement of our platform partners on these issues–as they recognize they need to be part of the solution."
Time to work on my Grimes album... 
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