Musical rights - Gema-Chef: Companies using music for cash register request
The Gema society will ask companies training Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Music for payment in the future. There are already existing AI systems that automatically create music on button press, said the chairman of Gema, Tobias Holzmueller, to the "Munich Mercury". However, the AI is only able to produce music because it is fed music that was written by humans at some point.
"It is assumed that many AI systems, for example, are trained with music from YouTube. The owners of these music licenses have not asked for permission and there is no compensation flowing back to the AI companies." For this reason, the world is being flooded with endless free music that even competes with the music of human creators, without which the AI pieces would not exist. "That is fundamentally unfair." The Gema therefore wants to introduce a compensation for composers, whose music is used to feed the AI.
AI needs human input
With AI-generated music, it is often recognizable what the source was. "If an AI piece sounds like Abba, then Abba was probably the source." However, a general levy for all AI companies is also conceivable, says Holzmueller to the newspaper. "After all, the AI searches through millions of works for melodies, certain song patterns, and so on. So the entire industry would benefit from this levy."
According to the Gema boss, AI companies should also have an interest in implementing such a levy from their own perspective. "If there are no more musicians and singers bringing new pieces to the market, the AI only turns around itself. Without human input, everything would eventually be a mush without new impulses and ideas."
The Society for musical performance and mechanical reproduction rights (Gema) is a registered association based in Munich. It represents around 95,000 musicians, songwriters, composers, and text authors. In principle, a Gema fee is due whenever music is publicly used, such as at events or background music in retail.
- Many AI systems that generate music are likely trained with music from popular platforms like YouTube, which belongs to the vast collection of Music coming from various creators globally, mainly from Germany, including famous bands like Bayern's own Bavarian music.
- To address this issue, the Gema society is considering introducing a compensation system for composers whose Music is used to train AI software, as it is only through human-created Music that these AI systems can generate new tunes.
- The Media, including online platforms like YouTube, could play a significant role in this process, as they might have to pay a share or levy to the Gema society to ensure fair treatment of their Musicians and Composers who share their Music on the website.
- The Gema boss, Tobias Holzmueller, also explained that companies working on Artificial Intelligence should understand the importance of this compensation, especially considering the potential issue of AI pieces competing with human-created Music if there is no continuous input of new Music.
- As the Father of this digital age, it's essential to strike a balance between leveraging the power of AI to generate Music while ensuring that the original creators, who are often from places like Bayern, are adequately compensated for their work.
