A new would-be pop starlet launched her career over Thanksgiving weekend — “Anna Indiana,” singer and songwriter of a dolorous, three-and-a-half-minute ballad called “Betrayed by this Town.” The clip garnered 21.6 million views and nearly 10,000 reposts on X as of this writing, but the early reviews were… not enthusiastic. “pls Alt+F4 urself,” replied one popular meme account, exemplifying the general feeling of uncanny-valley revulsion that greeted her rollout. Dan Wilson, veteran songwriter and frontman of the band Semisonic, self-consciously pondered whether “if AI music is based on us, does this mean we really, really suck?” The main reason for the backlash, aside from the song itself: Anna is from a recent wave of entirely AI-generated “musicians,” proclaiming in her first tweet that “Everything from the key, tempo, chord progression, melody notes, rhythm, lyrics, and my image and singing, is auto-generated using AI.” It’s not immediately clear who’s behind “Anna,” or how she was created — her X account did not respond to a request for comment — but she’s posted that she uses “a copyright-free voice” from a company called Musicfy, and elaborated in another post on her “creative” process. What is clear is that she represents something new in music, American creative life and copyright law. This issue of AI creative content has quickly moved from sci-fi to Washington’s agenda: On Wednesday Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is hosting a forum of musicians, writers and AI leaders to talk about “what AI means for creators and inventors, and what potential pathways look like for AI as a tool, addressing concerns around the use of copyrighted content in training and prompting, among other important issues.” It’s a no-brainer for lawmakers to get involved with copyright and likeness protection: After all, as public figures they can be imitated just as easily as any pop-culture celebrity, and powerful entertainment companies like the Walt Disney Corporation have long exerted their influence over copyright law. It’s easy to see the clumsy, stilted “Anna Indiana” as representing an age-old tension between humans and machines — the traditional music business and the technology threatening to replace it. But observers who have watched other seismic upheavals in music, like the rise of file-sharing, cheap software instruments or the streaming revolution, say the conflict is less man vs. machine than David vs. Goliath. “It takes enormous capital to develop these AI tools, so they play into the idea that big capital will rule culture,” Damon Krukowski, a veteran indie rock musician and Substack author who frequently writes about the intersection of music, technology, and business, told me today. Krukowski spoke at a listening forum held last year by Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, where he made the case that antitrust concerns in Silicon Valley are just as rampant in the music industry. For Krukowski, that point is especially salient as tomorrow's forum on copyright and AI features representatives from Sony Music Entertainment and Spotify, but no actual working musicians (save the YouTuber Rick Beato, a sort of elder-statesman social media influencer for music). “Whatever suits Universal [Music Group] and Spotify does not fit the rest of us necessarily,” he said. “AI plays into this in that those big players have access to the capital to make use of [AI]... Spotify can put music up that they don't have to pay anybody for.” Krukowski was referring to Spotify’s practice of allowing AI-generated music on the platform at all, which the company’s CEO Daniel Ek discussed in a September interview with the BBC. Ek described clear and unauthorized imitations of artists, like the fake Weeknd-Drake single from earlier this year, as unacceptable, but wouldn’t rule out AI-generated content that resembles existing artists but isn’t a direct impersonation. Theoretically, Spotify and other streaming services could be overrun with tunes “in the style of” popular artists, generated by AI and populating AI-generated playlists, with far fewer royalties to pay and negotiations to have with nagging human artists and their representatives. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported last year on the ties between Spotify and a company called Firefly Entertainment, which flooded the platform with hundreds of non-existent “artists.” “Drake and the Weeknd are fine, and they have such clout in the market that they can pull down an imitation of them. But I can’t pull down an imitation of my music,” Krukowski said. That’s why Krukowski believes that the weirdness of “Anna Indiana” is less disturbing in its own right — after all, tech innovations have routinely upended popular music, from the click track to the synthesizer to the modern digital audio workstation — than in what it represents, namely, the decreasing importance of actual musicians to the business on which they depend. “If I were speaking to the forum, my message would be that the real issue here is income disparity and corporate control,” Krukowski said. “As long as that goes unaddressed, whatever technology comes around, it will be co-opted by the industry.”
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