Spotify partnering with multinational music companies to develop ‘responsible’ AI products

A picture


Spotify has announced it is teaming up with the world’s biggest music companies to develop “responsible” artificial intelligence products that respect artists’ copyright.The market-leading music streamer is collaborating with the Sony, Universal and Warner music groups – whose combined rosters feature artists including Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift – to create new AI features.Spotify did not give details of what the new products would entail, but the company said artists would not be forced to participate, and their copyright would not be violated.In a blogpost announcing the agreement, Spotify referred pointedly to a move-fast-and-break-things approach to copyright in some parts of the tech industry.The tension between the music industry and some tech firms has already led to three major labels suing AI companies whose tools create music from user prompts.

“Some voices in the tech industry believe copyright should be abolished,” said Spotify.“We don’t.Musicians’ rights matter.Copyright is essential.If the music industry doesn’t lead in this moment, AI-powered innovation will happen elsewhere, without rights, consent, or compensation.

”The issue of copyright – a legal right that prevents others from using your work without permission – has become a battleground between the creative industries and the tech sector, which has been using publicly available, copyright-protected data to build artificial intelligence tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.The three music majors are suing two AI music startups, Udio and Suno, for alleged copyright infringement, amid similar lawsuits in other areas of the media and creative world.Both Udio and Suno have said their technology is designed to generate new musical output and does not reproduce specific artists’ work.The head of Universal Music Group, Sir Lucian Grainge, wrote in a memo to staff this week that Universal would seek an artist’s consent before licensing use of their voice or existing songs to an AI company.One of the most notorious musical deepfakes was published in 2023.

Heart on My Sleeve, a song featuring AI-made vocals purporting to be Drake and the Weeknd, was pulled from streaming services after Universal, which represented both artists, criticised the song for “infringing content created with generative AI”.Sign up to TechScapeA weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our livesafter newsletter promotionSpotify, which has 276 million paying subscribers, said it had begun building a state-of-the-art generative AI research lab to create “breakthrough experiences” for fans and artists.The Stockholm-based company said the products would create new revenue streams for artists and songwriters, ensuring they are “properly compensated for uses of their work and transparently credited for their contributions”.Spotify is also partnering with Merlin, a digital rights company for independent record labels, and Believe, a French digital music label, as part of the AI collaboration.Spotify already uses AI to create playlists and a personalised DJ.

The heads of the three majors welcomed the agreement, with the chair of Sony Music Group, Rob Stringer, saying that there must “direct licensing” of artists’ work before a new product is launched,Universal’s Grainge said he wanted a “thriving commercial landscape” in which the music industry and tech companies could flourish,The head of Warner Music Group, Robert Kyncl, expressed approval for Spotify’s “thoughtful AI guardrails”,
cultureSee all
A picture

French woman in mother of all trademark battles with DC Comics over parenting app Wondermum

A French woman is involved in the mother of all battles with DC Comics for naming her family advice app Wondermum.Lise Sobéron received a letter from the superhero comic book company’s French lawyers on 1 April this year demanding she stop using the name because of its alleged similarity to Wonder Woman.“When I got the letter, I rang my close friends and said: ‘Very funny, guys,’ thinking it was an April fool,” she said. “Then I contacted the lawyers’ office and realised it was no joke. They told me DC Comics objected to the name Wondermum

A picture

Louder than Bombs: Joachim Trier’s thorniest film might be his best

Long before Joachim Trier made the Oscar-winning The Worst Person in the World and this year’s festival megahit Sentimental Value, there was 2015’s Louder than Bombs: a far stranger, slipperier film worth watching for Isabelle Huppert’s spectral turn alone. She plays a character also called Isabelle, a renowned war photographer whose secrets haunt her family three years after her sudden death.Her teenage son Conrad (Devin Druid) still daydreams in class about the car crash that claimed her life, imagining her final, panicked moments. His brother Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and father Gene (Gabriel Byrne) know (and conceal) the truth: that her fateful, split-second swerve was an act of suicide.The film’s cacophony of grief and anxious romance erupt within upstate New York, 6,000km away from the Nordic, millennial anomie of Joachim’s informal Oslo trilogy

A picture

Creative Australia awards Khaled Sabsabi $100,000 grant months after dumping from Venice Biennale

Creative Australia has awarded a $100,000 grant to artist Khaled Sabsabi, months after he was controversially dumped and then reinstated by the federal arts body as Australia’s representative for the 2026 Venice Biennale.The grant – one of 16 made under Creative Australia’s Visual Arts, Craft and Design Framework – will fund the creation of a new body of work for a solo exhibition opening in March 2027 at Adelaide’s Samstag Museum of Art, which will also include Sabsabi’s Venice Biennale work.In August, Sabsabi was also awarded a grant by Create NSW for a major new work in western Sydney.The two commissions represent a silver lining in a tumultuous year for Sabsabi, a Lebanese-Australian artist from western Sydney. In February, he and curator Michael Dagostino were announced as Australia’s representatives for the prestigious Venice Biennale; less than a week later they were sacked, after criticism by the Australian and the then shadow arts minister, Claire Chandler, over Sabsabi’s use of imagery in previous artworks of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah

A picture

‘The vocals were on another level’: how Counting Crows made Mr Jones

Our first four records had been mostly made in houses in the hills above Los Angeles. August and Everything After was our first major label album, so it was a pretty big deal. Our advance was $3,000 each; I bought a 1971 cherry red VW Karmann Ghia convertible and drove it to LA.I would get up every morning and listen to Pickin’ Up the Pieces by Poco, which is like the Beatles doing country music. I also had this Benny Goodman album that I was listening to a lot – my dad had picked it up as a free giveaway at a Texaco station when I was a kid

A picture

‘A palette unlike anything in the west’: Ben Okri, Yinka Shonibare and more on how Nigerian art revived Britain’s cultural landscape

To mark a new exhibition at Tate Modern, leading British-Nigerian cultural figures trace the impact of their heritage on their work, and consider its growing influence on the world stageSome primal energy was unleashed among Nigerian artists in the years leading up to independence. The century-long reign of colonialism was nearing its end and the people of Nigeria, with its over 300 tribes, its ebullient energy, were poised for a new future in which they would determine the shape and context of their lives.And the people who most articulated that double position, that paradox of modernity and tradition, were artists in all their stripes. Artists across the country, in constant dialogue with one another, created works that evoked their traditions but in a contemporary context. Artists such as Yusuf Grillo in the north, Bruce Onobrakpeya from the midwest, Ben Enwonwu from the east and Twins Seven Seven from the west were remaking the dream of art in a rigorously Nigerian context

A picture

Perfume Genius: ‘I really like body hair! I like a bush. I didn’t even notice Jimmy Fallon censored mine’

The singer on looking like Amelia Earhart, the time he set his mother’s house on fire and his beef with the Octopus Teacher guyEveryone was talking about your pubic hair after it was censored on The Tonight Show. Should we all be showing more or less bush?More! I really like body hair. I like a bush. I like the whole deal. I’m sure if I didn’t have a bush, they wouldn’t have censored it