The world’s largest music company Universal Music and the Meta Group have signed a new licensing agreement for the use of the Universal catalog. According to the announcement, the agreement covers both the recordings distributed through Universal and the songs administered by Universal’s publishing division. The companies signed the most recent licensing agreement in 2022, the first dates back to 2017. Financial details of the new deal were not disclosed.
The agreement allows users to use the works from Universal’s catalog for posts on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, the metaverse platform Horizon and the still young short message service Threads. The agreement that has now been concluded should also make this possible for WhatsApp for the time being. However, corresponding functions such as those on Instagram have not yet been integrated into the service.
Dispute over training of AI models
In May, Meta stopped licensing music videos for Facebook, as Universal’s CFO Boyd Muir explained at the end of July when presenting the latest quarterly figures. The move was a special effect that had reduced Universal’s revenue in the advertising-based streaming segment. The weaker than investors expected streaming growth had caused Universal’s shares to plummet by more than 20 percent.
Both parties now also emphasize in the statement that they want to continue to take action against “unauthorized AI-generated content.” While the music industry always emphasizes the potential opportunities offered by AI in songwriting or marketing, the unauthorized and unpaid training of AI models with copyrighted music is a thorn in its side. The protection of personal rights, for example with regard to the voice of artists, must also be ensured, it is always said with regard to deepfakes.
Lawsuits against Suno and Udio
At the end of June, the American umbrella organization of labels, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), filed a lawsuit against the AI start-ups Udio and Suno on behalf of the three so-called majors, Universal, Sony and Warner. The companies’ tools generate complete songs at the touch of a button, some of which sound very similar to well-known works. This is only possible because the models were trained with them, the music companies allege.
The start-ups believe their approach is covered by the “fair use” principle that exists in the USA, as the models learned from the protected material and created new works with what they had “learned”. Suno boss Mikey Shulman compared the approach in a blog post to a child “who writes his own rock songs after listening to music from that genre”.
The RIAA promptly contradicted this view. Violations “on an industrial scale” could not be considered “fair use”, especially since the songs created on this basis competed directly with the originals for royalties. As early as October 2023, Universal’s publishing division, Universal Music, Concord Music and ABKCO Music filed a lawsuit against the AI start-up Anthropic. This, too, is about training the AI model. According to the publishers, Anthropic used song lyrics for this without a license agreement, so that the model called Claude provides users with similar or “almost identical” copies of the lyrics.
