Universal Music and Warner Music close to a deal with Ai's companies

Universal Music and Warner Music, two of the three majors in the global record market, are close to closing 'historic deals' to license music to artificial intelligence companies. This was revealed by the Financial Times, which cites sources close to the negotiations.

Within a few weeks, according to the British newspaper, Universal Music and Warner Music could sign deals with players ranging from ElevenLabs to Stability Ai, Suno, Udio and Klay Vision. Other negotiations, according to the reconstruction, would then concern more traditional tech companies such as Alphabet Google, owner of YouTube, and Spotify. Possible deals in this direction have been talked about at least since before the summer.

The scenario is well known: the growing use of generative Ai in the creative industry has triggered a wave of lawsuits, with artists, authors and various rights holders accusing Ai companies of using copyright-protected material without consent (and especially compensation) to train their artificial intelligence models. The various lawmakers are scrambling as best they can, while there is no shortage of pressure from Big Tech, inclined to bend the legislative framework to their own business. Despite the legitimate interests of content creators.

According to the latest reconstructions, the negotiations of Universal Music and Warner Music would focus on how the labels will license their songs for the creation of artificial intelligence-generated tracks and the training of large language models.

The record companies are trying to achieve a payment structure similar to that of streaming, whereby playing a song triggers a kind of 'micropayment' to the various rightsholders.