Two months ago, I wrote a Linkedin post about how copyrighting sounds and music will be the biggest disruption from Ai. My reasoning was pretty simple – ownership. Most of the music in the world is owned by three major music labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group. The 4th largest label’s revenue is barely 1/10th of 3rd place.
I can’t remember how many days ago, I listened to a fire Drake and Weeknd song for the first time on TikTok. At the moment, there were 40,000 views. A guy named ghostwriter977 who claimed it was Ai generated with his lyrics posted the song. Part of me had doubts because everyone lies on social media. That aside, the song was a banger. Three days later, I see reposts of the song everywhere confirming it is not an original Drake and Weeknd song. At this point, the song was at 10 million views on Tiktok.
Since that song, tons of small music producers I have been listening to a ton of songs with famous Ai voices and I have been on a crazy binge. Oddly enough it’s been putting me in a really good mood. Mostly Kanye, MJ, and Arianna. There’s even a Biden and Obama jam that’s pretty good. On a side note, if there could only be one artist I could listen to forever, it would be Kanye.
The music labels are probably going to have a field day shutting all this stuff down but this feels familiar. It feels like the days of Limewire and Napster again. I’d be curious if they will be able to shut all this down before it manifests into something out of their control. How? Who knows? Some have said that Ai is destroying the music industry, if three major music labels shoving music they dictate is considered the music industry then sure. But we don’t know what specifically is being attacked as spectators but there is certainly something new is being created.
