FT Tech Tonic AI Music: ‘Theft machines’?
30 snips
Sep 10, 2025 AI music is shaking up the industry by harvesting existing songs to create new tracks, leading to a storm of copyright lawsuits. The emergence of AI bands like Velvet Sundown raises questions about authenticity and legal rights in music. Artists share their concerns about how these technologies could affect their revenues and identities. Meanwhile, the tension between innovation and protecting musicians continues to ignite debates within streaming platforms, highlighting the value of human emotion in music creation.
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AI Band That Fooled Listeners
- The Velvet Sundown was an elaborate deception: AI generated the lyrics, melodies and artwork for a fake 70s band.
- Their debut album hit a million streams, exposing how convincingly AI can mimic real artists.
How AI Learns Music
- Training music models requires scraping millions of songs to predict and replicate audio sequences.
- That repeated copying during training is central to how generative music models produce new songs.
Scale Changes The Ethics
- Modern training processes differ fundamentally from human musical learning and rely on billions of data points.
- Musicians argue this large-scale copying constitutes copyright infringement because their work is reused without permission.
