Library music = dead within 3 years. A hunt in which i personally have zero dogs, but keep in mind that the stuff in MusicLM is early days and the lowest-hanging fruit.
And the copyright holders of every track in the training set are owed royalties. If the law doesn't find that soon, then the law can't safeguard anyone's intellectual property over any timeframe of historical interest.
3 years? I think that's generous. And it won't just be production music. These things will make cues of every type better and faster than any of us... including the musical "geniuses" we all adore. And it will do it instantly. Lots of folks seem to think that we people aren't based on algos and that we're something "special". Our brains are most certainly algorithmic, easily hackable and easily imitated. We're seeing the baby-steps towards imitation happening now (marketing, religions, conspiracies, etc prove the hackable part). AI will be good at those things, too.
You can bet that all the tech we're seeing right now from Google, OpenAI and the like (even the latest "best" ones) are nothing compared to what they almost certainly have in the lab right now that we aren't privy to. From competition to public acceptance... they have the drib and drab this stuff out a little at a time. And based on how we're all already freaking out I can't imagine how people are going to cope with what's next. Facebook has been working on a prompted AI video creator like DALL-E does with images. Soon you'll be able to create motion pictures with prompted AI and not need to pay for actors, directors, CGI, studios, etc. It's just mind blowing.
My wife and I have been using ChatGPT this past week and it's just unreal. For my wife, for whom English is a second language, this thing is a dream for cleaning up emails, writing reviews of peers and simple daily emails. She now feels more empowered, like she can communicate without feeling any stigma from her imperfect English. It's a lot of pressure when you are trying to do a complex job, but with the daily interoffice crap being the most challenging and distracting thing (especially for foreign folks). AI is going to definitely help with all that drudgery. But at what cost to the rest?
**And on the subject of royalties... since these things are
learning from datasets, is it actually infringement? I can also learn from datasets, and as long as I am not duplicating someone elses IP exactly, then it that infringement? Are influences infringement, or at least some type of infringement that we all accept somehow?
As a guitarist pretty much every lick I play came from someone else, or was influenced thusly. Do I owe Eric Johnson a bunch of royalties if I ever have a successful commercial release because I was influenced by him? (Eric and his lawyer can rest assured, that will never happen. lol).
I think people assume that these things are using little fragments of shredded paper to reconstruct things seemingly from scratch, but that is not how this works. This is a form of
learning, not a series of xeroxed carbon copies being cleverly stiched together. That
would be infringement, but this is not the case. It's sticky legal territory because these things are actually employing a form of
thinking and learning in a very real sense, and are not simply copying and pasting the way most people seem to think.