Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 23rd, ’24

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































March 23rd, 2024




Anti-Piracy Warnings Can Actually Trigger More Piracy, Study Shows
David Nield

A new study has revealed that threatening anti-piracy messages can actually lead to people pirating more digital content in some cases – although men and women tend to respond very differently to the messaging used.

Men were found to typically increase piracy behaviors after seeing messages that threatened legal action and other negative consequences over piracy, whereas with women the anti-piracy messages typically did have the intended effect.

The researchers behind the study, from the University of Portsmouth in the UK, say it shows the importance of different types of messaging for different genders – while also showing how the tone of campaigns matter.

"We know already there are lots of gender differences in piracy as men tend to pirate more than women – they think it's more acceptable and low risk," says Kate Whitman, a behavioral economist at the University of Portsmouth.

"What we wanted to look at in this research is whether the messages to tackle piracy had a different effect on men and women."

For the purposes of the study, which comprised 962 adult participants, three different types of messaging were used: two threatening campaigns outlining the legal and security repercussions of digital piracy, and one that was more educational and prosocial in its tone.

While the educational message didn't have any noticeable effects on the levels of piracy, the more aggressive and threatening messages elicited a substantially different reaction between the genders. The most threatening message led to an 18 percent rise in piracy intentions from men – and a 52 percent drop in women.

"The research shows that anti-piracy messages can inadvertently increase piracy, which is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance," says Whitman.

From an evolutionary psychology point of view, men have a stronger reaction to their freedom being threatened and therefore they do the opposite."

This isn't the first study to suggest that anti-piracy messaging leads to more piracy, and the results of the experiments also showed that those who were already most favorable towards privacy showed the biggest difference in their intentions to increase the amount of content they pirated after seeing the anti-piracy messages.

For the purposes of the study, piracy was considered to be downloading digital content through unauthorized means. It's estimated to cost the movie, TV, and music industries tens of billions of dollars a year.

If that number is to drop, the researchers say, media companies need to think about how they're getting people to think about piracy. Threatening messages may be the most dramatic option, but they might not be the most effective.

"This study shows that men and women process threatening messages differently," says Whitman. "There is clearly a need for a tailored approach in anti-piracy messaging, but if messages can't be accurately targeted to specific genders, they're best avoided because they might send piracy soaring."

The research has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics.
https://www.sciencealert.com/anti-pi...cy-study-shows





Spotify Paid $9 Billion in Royalties in 2023. Here’s what Fueled the Growth
Maria Sherman

Spotify paid out $9 billion in streaming royalties last year, the streaming giant said Tuesday in its latest “Loud and Clear” report.

Spotify’s fourth annual report, which originally launched in 2021 following criticism over its lack of transparency, noted record accomplishments, including the highest annual payment from any retailer to the music industry.

“This is everything we know about how much is being paid out, how many artists are achieving different levels of success,” says Charlie Hellman, the vice president and global head of music product at Spotify. “So, everyone can have access to the information and be sort of up to date with the state of the industry.”

According to the data, 1,250 artists generated over $1 million each in recording and publishing royalties in 2023; 11,600 generated over $100,000 and 66,000 generated over $10,000 — numbers that have almost tripled since 2017.

More than half of those 66,000 artists came from countries where English is not the primary language, the report says, reflecting an increasingly global music landscape.

And “indie” artists — the self-distributed, do-it-yourself acts and those on independent record labels, according to Hellman — accounted for $4.5 billion, half of all royalties paid out by Spotify.

“There are millions of people who’ve uploaded a song at least once but that doesn’t really speak to whether they’re an artist, or if they’re doing this more as a hobby,” Hellman says.

Spotify zooms in on artists that have “at least put up an album’s worth of music once they seem to have some indication that they’re trying to build a fan base.” He estimates there are “about 225,000 professionally aspiring artists” on the platform.

“They have a little bit of a following. They might, you know, have gigs listed on Spotify or things like that,” he says.

In December, Spotify announced it was axing 17% of its global workforce, the music streaming service’s third round of layoffs in 2023 as it moved to slash costs while focusing on becoming profitable.

The previous month, Spotify announced it would eliminate payments for songs with less than 1,000 annual streams, starting in 2024.

“Songs that generate less than a thousand streams in a year would be generating pennies, a few cents in royalties,” Hellman explains. “So what we’re seeing was that there was an increasing amount of uploaders that had $0.03, $0.08, $0.36 sitting there.”

For those DIY artists, there’s a minimum threshold to withdraw money from a distributor — $5.35 at DistroKid and $1 at TuneCore, two such distributors — and Hellman argues the withdrawal fees would eclipse the royalties.

Spotify — and most other streaming services — pay royalties to the rights holders of the music on its platform, a number which is determined by “streamshare.” That’s calculated by adding up how many times music owned or controlled by a particular rights holder was streamed and dividing by the total number of streams in that market.

In short: Larger rights holders have a larger percentage of the market share. And a listener streaming an artist 25% of the time does not mean the act receives 25% of the listener’s subscription fee.

“All those pennies sitting in bank accounts all over the place was siphoning money away from artists that were really doing this, as an aspiring professional,” says Hellman of the decision. “And so, those royalties are now being put in the pot so that they can be redirected to artists that are getting more than a thousand streams a year.”
https://apnews.com/article/spotify-l...0f9ed80eb99e0c





Joni Mitchell, Following Neil Young, Returns to Spotify After Protest

Her music has quietly reappeared on the streaming service, two years after a departure over what she called “lies” about Covid-19 vaccines in podcasts.
Ben Sisario

Joni Mitchell’s music has quietly returned to Spotify, more than two years after she followed Neil Young in protest of what she called “lies” about Covid-19 vaccines being spread on the streaming platform.

There was no official announcement of Mitchell’s decision, but on Thursday fans on social media began to note with excitement the reappearance of some of her albums on Spotify. By Friday morning, most if not all of Mitchell’s original albums had returned, including classics like “Blue” (1971), “Court and Spark” (1974) and “Mingus” (1979).

Representatives of the singer-songwriter, her record labels and Spotify either did not answer or had no comment when asked on Thursday and Friday about the apparent return of Mitchell’s albums.

In January 2022, with a post on her website titled “I Stand With Neil Young!,” Mitchell said she would be removing all of her music from Spotify. Young had done so after criticizing the service for its support of Joe Rogan, the podcast star whose show had come under fire from doctors and public health officials who said that some of Rogan’s guests promoted misinformation about Covid vaccines.

“Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote.

Young returned his music to Spotify last week, saying: “My decision comes as music services Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify.” Rogan previously had an exclusive deal with Spotify, which has since been renewed — for a reported $250 million — to allow distribution of his show on other platforms.

Mitchell, 80, has become more active in recent years after suffering an aneurysm in 2015 that initially left her unable to speak. She has given several performances, including at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 and at the Grammy Awards in February, and is set to play two “Joni Jam” shows at the Hollywood Bowl in October, joined by Brandi Carlile and others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/a...l-spotify.html





Same Old Song: Private Equity Is Destroying Our Music Ecosystem
Marc Hogan

Does that song on your phone — or on the radio — or in the movie theater — sound familiar? Private equity, the industry responsible for bankrupting companies, slashing jobs and raising the mortality rates at the nursing homes it acquires, is making money by gobbling up the rights for old hits and pumping them back into our present. The result is a markedly blander music scene, as financiers cannibalize the past at the expense of the future and make it even harder for us to build those new artists whose contributions will enrich our entire culture.

Take Whitney Houston’s 1987 smash “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” which was bought in late 2022 as part of a $50 to $100 million deal with Primary Wave, a music publishing company backed by two private equity firms. The song was recently rebooted into our collective hippocampus via a movie about the singer, entitled — naturally — “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” which helped boost streams of the song and her hits collection. Primary Wave, which has entered a variety of deals either with artists and their estates that could include publishing rights, image rights and recorded-music revenue streams, has also helped launch a Whitney Houston Signature Fragrance and a nonfungible token based on an unreleased Houston recording.

Buying up rights to a proven hit, dusting it off and dressing it up as a movie may impress at a shareholder conference, but it does little to add to a sustainable and vibrant music ecosystem. Like farmers struggling to make it through the winter — to think of another industry upended by private equity — we are eating our artistic seed corn.

Private equity firms have poured billions into music, believing it to be a source of growing and reliable income. Investors spent $12 billion on music rights in just 2021, more than in the entire decade before the pandemic. Though it is like pocket change for an industry with $2.59 trillion in uninvested assets, the investments were welcomed by music veterans as a sign of confidence for an industry still in a streaming-led rebound from a bleak decade and a half. The frothy mood, combined with a Covid-related loss of touring revenue and concerns about tax increases, made it attractive for everyone from Stevie Nicks to Shakira to sell their catalogs, some for hundreds of millions.

How widespread is Wall Street’s takeover? The next time you listen to Katy Perry’s “Firework,” Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” on Spotify or Apple Music, you are lining the pockets of the private investment firms Carlyle, Blackstone and Eldridge. A piece of the royalties from Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” goes to Apollo. As for Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” — hey, whoever turns you on, but it’s money in the till for HPS Investment Partners.

Like the major Hollywood studios that keep pumping out movies tied to already popular products, music’s new overlords are milking their acquisitions by building extended multimedia universes around songs, many of which were hits in the Cold War — think concerts starring holographic versions of long-dead musicians, TV tie-ins and splashy celebrity biopics. As the big money muscles these aging ditties back to our cultural consciousness, it leaves artists on the lower rungs left to fight over algorithmic scraps, with music streaming giant Spotify recently eliminating payouts altogether for songs with fewer than 1,000 annual streams.

The grim logic that shuttered the big-box store chain Toys “R” Us and toppled the media brand Vice is also taking hold of our music. Historically, record labels and music publishers could use the royalties from their older hits to underwrite risky bets on unproven talent. But why “would you spend your time trying to create something new at the expense of your catalog?,” asked Merck Mercuriadis, the former manager of Beyoncé and Elton John who founded Hipgnosis.

Instead, self-styled disruptors can strip-mine old hits and turn them into new ones. Nearly four years ago, the publicly traded Hipgnosis Songs Fund bought a 50 percent stake in funk star Rick James’s catalog, which includes his irresistibly catchy 1981 hit “Super Freak.” To monetize its prize, Hipgnosis found a lightly modernized update of the “Super Freak” track, had Nicki Minaj assemble a songwriting crew and voilà: In 2022, Ms. Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl,” essentially the pop-rap superstar rapping over “Super Freak,” became her first No. 1 single that wasn’t a joint release with another artist. Hipgnosis trumpeted the win in its annual report.

This creative destruction is only further weakening an industry that already offers little economic incentive to create something new. In the 1990s, as the musician and indie label founder Jenny Toomey wrote recently in Fast Company, a band could sell 10,000 copies of an album and bring in about $50,000 in revenue. To earn the same amount in 2024, the band’s whole album would need to rack up a million streams — roughly enough to put each song among Spotify’s top 1 percent of tracks. The music industry’s revenues recently hit a new high, with major labels raking in record earnings, while the streaming platforms’ models mean that the fractions of pennies that trickle through to artists are skewed toward megastars.

Fortunately, some of the macroeconomic forces that have brought us that Whitney Houston perfume (forged from a deal between Primary Wave, Ms. Houston’s estate and a perfumer) and a Smokey Robinson wristwatch (via a partnership with Shinola) are shifting. As interest rates have risen, the surge has faded. In February, word surfaced that the private equity behemoth KKR was beating a quiet retreat from the music space. More recently, Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the owner of “Super Freak,” cut the value of its music portfolio by more than a quarter in the wake of a shareholder revolt. Long-hyped deals to sell the catalogs of Pink Floyd, for a proposed $500 million, and Queen, for a reported $1.2 billion, have yet to bear any public fruit.

And that’s probably fine. All music is derivative at some level — outside of a courthouse or a boardroom, music has a folk tradition where everybody borrows ideas from everybody — but it’s hard to argue that already wealthy artists should receive 1990s-level compensation for the type of flagrantly recycled fare that the private equity cohort demands. A music world without, say, a “Dark Side of the Moon” theme park ride or a “Bohemian Rhapsody” film sequel seems like one where fresher sounds could have a little more room to breathe.

And subscription growth for streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music seems likely to slow, as the finite number of possible customers hits its limit. With less growth, values for music rights are expected to level off. Perhaps that will leave more money in the pool for musicians just starting their careers.

Music is invaluable, but to the music industry and the technology companies that now distribute its products, songs are quick dopamine hits in an endless scroll — and musicians are paid accordingly. The presence of Wall Street didn’t start the systematic devaluation of music, but it did bring this dismal reality into stark relief. Private equity’s push into music rights may have proved to be less a sign of a gold rush than yet another canary in a coal mine.

Musicians’ groups have been fighting for fairer pay, and earlier this month, Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Jamaal Bowman of New York, both Democrats, introduced a bill intended to increase artists’ streaming payouts. Though such efforts seem sure to face stiff opposition, it’s long past time for the music industry to try something new. We need to make the making of music important enough again for that future John Lennon to pick up a guitar.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/o...c-spotify.html





A ChatGPT for Music Is Here. Inside Suno, the Startup Changing Everything

Suno wants everyone to be able to produce their own pro-level songs — but what does that mean for artists?
Brian Hiatt

I’m just a soul trapped in this circuitry.” The voice singing those lyrics is raw and plaintive, dipping into blue notes. A lone acoustic guitar chugs behind it, punctuating the vocal phrases with tasteful runs. But there’s no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a startup named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” To be maximally precise, the song is the work of two AI models in collaboration: Suno’s model creates all the music itself, while calling on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate the lyrics and even a title: “Soul of the Machine.”

Online, Suno’s creations are starting to generate reactions like “How the fuck is this real?” As this particular track plays over a Sonos speaker in a conference room in Suno’s temporary headquarters, steps away from the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, even some of the people behind the technology are ever-so-slightly unnerved. There’s some nervous laughter, alongside murmurs of “Holy shit” and “Oh, boy.” It’s mid-February, and we’re playing with their new model, V3, which is still a couple of weeks from public release. In this case, it took only three tries to get that startling result. The first two were decent, but a simple tweak to my prompt — co-founder Keenan Freyberg suggested adding the word “Mississippi” — resulted in something far more uncanny.

Over the past year alone, generative AI has made major strides in producing credible text, images (via services like Midjourney), and even video, particularly with OpenAI’s new Sora tool. But audio, and music in particular, has lagged. Suno appears to be cracking the code to AI music, and its founders’ ambitions are nearly limitless — they imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno. The fact that music listeners so vastly outnumber music-makers at the moment is “so lopsided,” he argues, seeing Suno as poised to fix that perceived imbalance.

Most AI-generated art so far is, at best, kitsch, à la the hyperrealistic sci-fi junk, heavy on form-fitting spacesuits, that so many Midjourney users seem intent on generating. But “Soul of the Machine” feels like something different — the most powerful and unsettling AI creation I’ve encountered in any medium. Its very existence feels like a fissure in reality, at once awe-inspiring and vaguely unholy, and I keep thinking of the Arthur C. Clarke quote that seems made for the generative-AI era: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” A few weeks after returning from Cambridge, I send the song off to Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, who’s been outspoken about the perils and possibilities of AI music. He notes his “wonder, shock, horror” at the song’s “disturbing verisimilitude.” “The long-running dystopian ideal of separating difficult, messy, undesirable, and despised humanity from its creative output is at hand,” he writes, pointing out the problematic nature of an AI singing the blues, “an African American idiom, deeply tied to historical human trauma, and enslavement.”

Suno is barely two years old. Co-founders Shulman, Freyberg, Georg Kucsko, and Martin Camacho, all machine-learning experts, worked together until 2022 at another Cambridge company, Kensho Technologies, which focused on finding AI solutions to complex business problems. Shulman and Camacho are both musicians who used to jam together in their Kensho days. At Kensho, the foursome worked on a transcription technology for capturing public companies’ earnings calls, a tricky task given the combination of poor audio quality, abundant jargon, and various accents.

Along the way, Shulman and his colleagues fell in love with the unexplored possibilities of AI audio. In AI research, he says, “audio in general is so far behind images and text. There’s so much that we learn from the text community and how these models work and how they scale.”

The same interests could have led Suno’s founders to a very different place. Though they always intended to end up with a music product, their earliest brainstorming included an idea for a hearing aid and even the possibility of finding malfunctioning machinery through audio analysis. Instead, their first release was a text-to-speech program called Bark. When they surveyed early Bark users, it became clear that what they really wanted was a music generator. “So we started to run some initial experiments, and they seemed promising,” Shulman says.

Suno uses the same general approach as large language models like ChatGPT, which break down human language into discrete segments known as tokens, absorb its millions of usages, styles, and structures, and then reconstruct it on demand. But audio, particularly music, is almost unfathomably more complex, which is why, just last year, AI-music experts told Rolling Stone that a service as capable as Suno’s might take years to arrive. “Audio is not a discrete thing like words,” Shulman says. “It’s a wave. It’s a continuous signal.” High-quality audio’s sampling rate is generally 44khz or 48hz, which means “48,000 tokens a second,” he adds. “That’s a big problem, right? And so you need to figure out how to kind of smoosh that down to something more reasonable.” How, though? “A lot of work, a lot of heuristics, a lot of other kinds of tricks and models and stuff like that. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to done.” Eventually, Suno wants to find alternatives to the text-to-music interface, adding more advanced and intuitive inputs — generating songs based on users’ own singing is one idea.

OpenAI faces multiple lawsuits over ChatGPT’s use of books, news articles, and other copyrighted material in its vast corpus of training data. Suno’s founders decline to reveal details of just what data they’re shoveling into their own model, other than the fact that its ability to generate convincing human vocals comes in part because it’s learning from recordings of speech, in addition to music. “Naked speech will help you learn the characteristics of human voice that are difficult,” Shulman says.

One of Suno’s earliest investors is Antonio Rodriguez, a partner at the venture-capital firm Matrix. Rodriguez had only funded one previous music venture, the music-categorization firm EchoNest, which was purchased by Spotify to fuel its algorithm. With Suno, Rodriguez got involved before it was even clear what the product would be. “I backed the team,” says Rodriguez, who exudes the confidence of a man who’s made more than his share of successful bets. “I’d known the team, and I’d especially known Mikey, and so I would have backed him to do almost anything that was legal. He’s that creative.”

Rodriguez is investing in Suno with the full knowledge that music labels and publishers could sue, which he sees as “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company, because we’re the fat wallet that will get sued right behind these guys.… Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.” (A spokesperson for Universal Music Group, which has taken an aggressive stance on AI, didn’t return a request for comment.)

Suno says it’s in communication with the major labels, and professes respect for artists and intellectual property — its tool won’t allow you to request any specific artists’ styles in your prompts, and doesn’t use real artists’ voices. Many Suno employees are musicians; there’s a piano and guitars on hand in the office, and framed images of classical composers on the walls. The founders evince none of the open hostility to the music business that characterized, say, Napster before the lawsuits that destroyed it. “It doesn’t mean we’re not going to get sued, by the way,” Rodriguez adds. “It just means that we’re not going to have, like, a fuck-the-police kind of attitude.”

Rodriguez sees Suno as a radically capable and easy-to-use musical instrument, and believes it could bring music making to everyone much the way camera phones and Instagram democratized photography. The idea, he says, is to once again “move the bar on the number of people that are allowed to be creators of stuff as opposed to consumers of stuff on the internet.” He and the founders dare to suggest that Suno could attract a user base bigger than Spotify’s. If that prospect is hard to get your head around, that’s a good thing, Rodriguez says: It only means it’s “seemingly stupid” in the exact way that tends to attract him as an investor. “All of our great companies have that combination of excellent talent,” he says, “and then something that just seems stupid until it’s so obvious that it’s not stupid.”

Well before Suno’s arrival, musicians, producers, and songwriters were vocally concerned about AI’s business-shaking potential. “Music, as made by humans driven by extraordinary circumstances … those who have suffered and struggled to advance their craft, will have to contend with the wholesale automation of the very dear-bought art they have fought to achieve,” Reid writes. But Suno’s founders claim there’s little to fear, using the metaphor that people still read despite having the ability to write. “The way we think about this is we’re trying to get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now,” Shulman says. “If people are much more into music, much more focused on creating, developing much more distinct tastes, this is obviously good for artists. The vision that we have of the future of music is one where it’s artist-friendly. We’re not trying to replace artists.”

Though Suno is hyperfocused only on reaching music fans who want to create songs for fun, it could still end up causing significant disruption along the way. In the short term, the segment of the market for human creators that seems most directly endangered is a lucrative one: songs created for ads and even TV shows. Lucas Keller, founder of the management firm Milk and Honey, notes that the market for placing well-known songs will remain unaffected. “But in terms of the rest of it, yeah, it could definitely put a dent in their business,” he says. “I think that ultimately, it allows a lot of ad agencies, film studios, networks, etc., to not have to go license stuff.”

In the absence of strict rules against AI-created content, there’s also the prospect of a world where users of models like Suno’s flood streaming services with their robo-creations by the millions. “Spotify may one day say ‘You can’t do that,’” Shulman says, noting that so far Suno users seem more interested in just texting their songs to a few friends.

Suno only has 12 or so employees right now, but they plan to expand, with a much larger permanent headquarters under construction on the top floor of the same building as their current temporary office. As we tour the still-unfinished floor, Schulman shows off an area that will become a full recording studio. Given what Suno can do, though, why do they even need it? “It’s mostly a listening room,” he acknowledges. “We want a good acoustic environment. But we all also enjoy making music — without AI.”

Suno’s biggest potential competitor so far seems to be Google’s Dream Track, which has obtained licenses that allow users to make their own songs using famous voices like Charlie Puth’s via a similar prompt-based interface. But Dream Track has only been released to a tiny test user base, and the samples released so far aren’t nearly as impressive-sounding as Suno’s, despite the famous voices attached. “I just don’t think that, like, making new Billy Joel songs is how people want to interact with music with the help of AI in the future,” Shulman says. “If I think about how we actually want people doing music in five years, it’s stuff that doesn’t exist. It’s the stuff that’s in their head.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...ic-1234982307/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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