Behind Musixmatch's product that helps Suno identify licensed content
Musixmatch says that opportunity for platforms is in keeping AI generated music up
There is a rise in AI music on music streaming and short video platforms. Deezer recently said that more than 50% of its daily uploads are now AI-generated tracks. A site named Sloptracker estimates that more than $2.6 million has been paid out to AI tracks by streaming services.
Despite being embroiled in multiple lawsuits, AI-powered music generators like Suno and Udio have raised millions of dollars in funding.
On the other hand, labels are trying to make the best of the situation and signing deals with platforms, including Suno and Udio, to let them legally use music for remixes and other AI generations to earn money.
Musixmatch, which has been a lyrics provider, is putting its eggs into multiple baskets to be a useful service for search engines, labels, and artists.
I spoke with Rio Caraeff, the company’s president for Business, Commercial, and AI, to discuss how Musixmatch is transforming itself for this age, and how it can do this while supporting artists. Caraeff has a great pedigree in the business as the founder and CEO of Vevo and Executive Vice President, Head of Digital Business at Universal Music.
Caraeff said that over the last year, the company has positioned itself to be a music administration tool rather than just being a lyrics provider. This means that stakeholders like labels can track where their tracks and compositions are being used and how they could be paid from that usage.
To do this, the company has launched a tool called Sentinel, which can keep an eye on copyrighted material use in real-time. This also means that it can track when any material is being used by AI services to generate media like songs. The company announced a deal with Suno for this service on Thursday.
“With Sentinel, our mission is to empower businesses to have total visibility into what’s happening on their platform. If they have an upload or prompt-based generation feature, we can basically determine whether anything is copyrighted or it is in the public domain,” Caraeff said.
The real opportunity for Sentinel is not taking anything down. The real opportunity is leaving it up. - Musixmatch President Rio Caraeff
He noted that Musixmatch doesn’t want to encourage takedowns of copyrighted content. Instead, he thinks that the opportunity for his company is bigger when platforms keep this content up and use Musixmatch to get a license for that piece of content. He equates Sentinel with YouTube’s Content ID.
“The real opportunity for Sentinel is not taking anything down. The real opportunity is leaving it up. Content ID on YouTube is really the model of how this is a big business opportunity. It’s about leaving things up so you can generate revenue and share revenue with everybody,” he said.
Musixmatch says that the system is used by 250,000 rights owners and can identify even milliseconds of use of material in over 250 languages. On a technical level, it can identify words that are in a prompt or in a recorded waveform.
“This is more robust than just detecting the fingerprint of the waveform itself because the sound can be modified, the sound can be edited, sped up, flipped backwards, and slowed down. And all of those things essentially make fingerprinting brittle there. But the words persist, and they survive,” Caraeff said.
The company wants to evolve Sentinel gradually. In the second stage, it wants to allow the platform to place a request for an instant license, and then, in the last stage, it wants to allow for recognizing full sound recordings.
Musixmatch said that it only passes a confidence score to the platform about the probability of copyright material usage.
Data deals and artist angles
Beyond Sentinel, the company is also exploring data deals on different fronts. One of them involves paying rights owners through revenue sharing when answers for lyrics and their meanings show up on chatbots like ChatGPT.
What’s more, the company is using its Musixmatch Pro program to let artists opt in, so they get paid when companies train models on their data. Other companies like music creation platform LANDR and distributor Ditto Music also offer similar programs.
When I asked what artists think about competition from generative AI tracks, the former Vevo CEO said that artists worry more about getting distribution.
“The thing that informs our philosophy is that we believe obscurity is the enemy of artistry. An artist’s greatest fear is playing to an empty room. Most artists that we work with want to find distribution. We find that a song being generated that potentially competes with them is a secondary concern,” he said.
Reports paint a contrasting picture, though. A survey of over 4,200 music creators in Australia and New Zealand revealed 82% of them feel AI will prevent them from making a living, but 38% said they are already using AI in their work. There were similar results in the UK, with 66% of respondents saying AI is a threat to their careers.
Some musicians are adopting AI tools while feeling hesitant about what the technology will mean to their careers. Plus, they are also in limbo about when and how much AI they can use without losing audience trust.
“I think that there’ll be an ascendant generation of creators who are AI native. They will have opinions and things to share, and they’re going to express themselves in new ways using these powerful tools. Because they’re just tools at the end of the day. And tools can be used for good and bad,” Caraeff said.