June 22 | TikTok's New Team, Universal & Meta's New Tools

Hey Everybody,

Welcome back to another week of Indie Insider Newsletter. Today is June 22nd, and this week, I had a little bit of help from one of my fabulous interns at Habitat Financial, Isaac Hwang, in putting our newsletter together.

As per usual, Indie Insider is brought to you by Habitat Financial, a financial operations platform built for music labels, distributors, and publishers. Our platform helps you track your expenses, process your royalties, make payments, and inform your decision-making process. Drop me a line if you’d like to know more, or visit www.habitat.financial .

And now, on to business:

TikTok ventures into acquiring and investing in music rights:

Recent news indicates that TikTok is creating an in-house Music Content Investment Team. Its mission will be focused on finding “partnership or acquisition opportunities in the music content space on a global level”. Based off new job ads posted by TikTok, TikTok intends to hire a team to “formulate and implement investment strategies aligned with TikTok’s objectives in music content operations” to “help shape the future of TikTok’s music businesses”.

TikTok’s intent to invest in music content and companies likely spawns from the development of TikTok’s SoundON service, which allows indie artists to distribute on TikTok and other services. By investing in music companies and content, TikTok could potentially retain a larger piece of the royalties from artists who use SoundOn to distribute their music. This would be to the detriment of major labels, who could see the artist pipeline from TikTok “virality” to major label signing diminish.

It’s also possible that TikTok is planning on purchasing unpopular back catalogs, in hopes that it blows up on the Internet in the future, to TikTok’s ensuing profit. However, only the future will tell.

Meta demos a new AI model that can take chords and beats and turn them into songs:

This week Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team gave us the first look at JASCO, a tool that uses chords or beats as simple inputs and creates full musical arrangements from them. To showcase its capabilities, Meta released a page of music clips which range from a folk-music version of Ravel’s Bolero complete with accordion and acoustic guitar to an R&B version of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake that includes deep bass, electronic drums, and lead trumpets.

This isn’t Meta’s first time dabbling in AI music technology. A year ago, Meta demonstrated MusicGen, a text-to-audio generator that could create 12-second tracks from text prompts. Unlike the AI technology created by Udio and Suno, which can create entire songs from nothing more than AI prompts, Meta’s tools seem to be more interested in increasing workflow efficiency from existing ingredients. Meta explicitly claims that these new AI tools are meant to improve artistry by creating sounds that artists can use to fine tune their own songs. For example, a drummer could train an AI model on their own drumming to create unique beats in their own style.

While AI technology in the music industry is often portrayed in negative light, AI can also be used to save indie artists time and money in polishing their craft. I tend to think that once the novelty of fully artificial music wears off, AI will emerge as just another tool in an artist's tech-stack.

Universal Music Group announces partnership with SoundLab to give voice cloning technology to its artists

Universal Music Group's latest collaboration with SoundLab allows its artists to create “high-fidelity voice models” using the artist’s data. These voice models allow artists to perform vocal transformations like voice-to-instrument, speech to singing, and language transposition. However, what differentiates this tool from other AI tools is that artists keep complete ownership and control over their vocal model.

In a response to concerns over AI, UMG states that “Artificial intelligence, when used ethically and trained consensually, has the promethean ability to unlock unimaginable new creative insights, diminish friction in the creative process and democratize creativity for artists, fans, and creators of all stripes. We are designing tools not to replace human artists, but to amplify human creativity.”

UMG states that this partnership is connected to their commitment to responsible use of AI in music. UMG is amongst other major music companies who are campaigning against copyrighted music being used to train AI models without proper consent, credit, or compensation.

As is often the case with Universal, they will move in directions that maximize shareholder value, and allow (or damn) other independent music companies to follow in their wake.

That’s it for this week’s news! Catch y’all later and stay tuned for more updates.

Cheers,

Calvin Windschitl

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