YouTube Negotiating with Record Companies for AI Music Training

TapTechNews June 26, it is reported by The Financial Times of UK that YouTube is negotiating with record companies to obtain the copyright of songs so that its AI can learn the music of popular artists.

Three people familiar with the matter disclosed that YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is preparing to introduce new AI tools this year, so the company needs to obtain the content copyright of record companies.

According to sources, YouTube has offered large amounts of cash to major record companies such as Sony, Warner, and Universal in an attempt to persuade more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI.

Referring to the previous report of TapTechNews, Sony Music, Universal Music, and Warner Music jointly sued the artificial intelligence companies Suno and Udio this week, accusing them of committing large-scale copyright infringement by using the recordings of these record companies to train music-generating AI systems.

In the lawsuit, it is mentioned that these companies (Suno and Udio) copied music without permission and trained their systems to create music, and this music will directly compete with, devalue, and ultimately drown out the works of human artists.

Suno's CEO Mikey Shulman responded: Our technology is transformative, it is designed to generate completely new outputs rather than remembering and repeating existing content. According to the previous report of TapTechNews, they just announced the release of V3.5 model at the beginning of this month and declared that it is open to all users.

The record companies demand a statutory damages of $150,000 (TapTechNews note: currently about 1.094 million RMB) for each song and allege that Suno has copied 662 songs and Udio has copied 1670 songs.