November 2024 Hill Briefing on AI and the Future of Music

On Thursday, November 14, 2024, the Center for AI Policy held a briefing for House staff on AI and the Future of Music: Innovation, IP Rights, and Workforce Adaptation.

Moderated by the Center’s Executive Director Jason Green-Lowe, panelists Kevin Erickson (Future of Music Coalition), Jessica Richard (Recording Industry Association of America), Rohan Paul (Controlla), and Ekene Chuks-Okeke (Internet Law and Policy Foundry) discussed the current use of AI in the music industry, the complex legal questions surrounding copyright, and the industry’s shifting business realities.

The discussion generated some key insights:

• While AI generated music has advanced artist creativity and efficiencies in the music industry, it also raises legal and ethical questions about artist compensation, consent, and credit. Despite these tensions, there is room for collaboration between developers and artists that can enhance human creativity even further if the rights of artists are respected. 
• We can expect to see potential patterns and trends emerging from current legal disputes about AI music around fair use factors of copyrighted music, such as the nature of the use, the nature of copyrighted work, and market effect, that indicate musicians may have stronger copyright cases than general large language AI cases.
• There is still much debate about the extent to which AI generated music is copyrightable based on the level of human involvement. There is support for copyrighting AI generated work when an artist trains an AI model on songs that he or she owns to extend their own work. On the other hand, questions remain about artist transparency in the use of AI in generating art, and under what circumstances human prompting will be sufficient to support a copyright case. 
• There is hope for clearer federal rules on the transparency of what data is being used in AI systems that generate AI music so that copyright holders can enforce their rights. There is also strong support for federal legislation like the NO FAKES Act that could help establish rules that allow for more control over artists’ voices and likenesses.
• Artists are grappling with the hypercompetitive recording music market created by streaming services, likely to be exacerbated by AI music. However, AI also presents income generating opportunities if artists opt into consenting to the use of their voice or songs that could increase the use, visibility, and reach of their work.

A video recording is available on the Center for AI Policy’s YouTube channel.