There’s nothin’ like a good dose of fear-mongering to get the blood pumping, so this week’s indie artist outrage is directed at a small line in the Bandcamp terms and conditions.
It’s located in the Intellectual Property Rights - Artists section of the agreement and reads:
“Each Artist uploading Music to the Service grants Company and its authorized sublicensees and distributors, if any, the worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, right and license to: (i) reproduce, distribute, publicly perform (including on a through-to-the-audience basis and by means of a digital audio transmission), publicly display, create derivate works of, communicate to the public, synchronize and otherwise exploit..”
The line “create derivate works of” has been singled out to assume that means “can be used to train AI models” which is causing the concern as hey - AI is the buzzword of the moment.
Remember, legalese is weaselese, and we have courts that decide daily what interpretation of what specific wording in a contract is correct depending on who’s suing who, or indeed something as heavy duty as the constitution means. So, people might have a point?
There’s also another line, later about IP that reads:
“solely in connection with the Service or in the marketing, promotion or advertising of the service, including in all forms of marketing, promotion, and advertising materials now known or hereafter created.”
So, dang. Reading is too difficult and time consuming, I get it, it’s easier to be outraged and respond to a tweet acting as engagement bait. Update. - About a week after I wrote this, Bandcamp actually issued a statement officially quashing the rumour.
But..since we are here, let’s focus on AI for a minute. It could mean your precious music can be used to train an AI model if some lawyer decides so, right?
Now, If *I* owned a weasel AI music company I’d train it on songs that were as successful as possible. I’d do that because my sell would be that the model would produce commercially viable music. As much as we like to believe our own creations are magical flowers, they’re probably not the target of our robot tech bro overlords.
From the hip-hop perspective, If they DO train AI on millions of generic beats, then the AI engine will produce, that’s right - more generic beats which actually would give those people who are truly creative an advantage as their work won’t sound like the sum average of all of the mid tunes the model has been trained on.
And that’s the key - everything that really works and connects with people tends to have a twist, an angle, and that’s the beauty of you being you.
If you think about it, your musical taste is the product of you “training yourself” on all of the music you listened to and enjoyed from childhood to now. There’s even a New York Times study which showed that it’s very likely your favourite song is one from your teenage years, and even though we evolve, most of what we love is tied to our early development, perhaps from a time when music was more dominant in our lives, and the mundane time consuming reality of adulthood took over. However, you as a human have that “dataset” (to use their language about art) plus all of the things that make you human, from emotion, to randomness, to borderline insanity - so don’t worry, there’s hope!
If you make objectively generic crapola, yes - worry. It was nice knowing you. You will be replaced by a subscription AI model. People, companies that want background filler music will also use these services or are just plain cheap, reducing the market for that kind of material.
However, this will probably create saturation if everyone uses it, as it won’t really cause an emotional connection to people, and again, if an ad agency wants to win, they’ll probably have to seek out the special, and unique, yes - your music.
If you think about commercials, they use hits we already like to convince us the product is as cool as the song we love, or use a song that somehow has a vibe, lyric or feeling that helps shove the advertisers message into our lizard brains.
If you are towards the sharp end of creative, then I’m happy to say it’s possible that the art you will create may well become the favourite tune of someone in their early 20’s somewhere on the planet and go on to influence them to make something great later down the line.
Note: As some of you might know, I have had to re-brand to Deluxe Mixing due to Meta-related issues and this blog post was extracted from the debut episode of the Deluxe Mixing Podcast, available now at all the usual places!
If you need a mixing engineer to work with, as ever - hit me up.
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