Latest news with #BandLab
CairoScene
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
El Nashmy Drops Dark-Trap Debut ‘Esh El 3amal' via RAAD Records
North Sinai's El Nashmy emerges with 'Esh El 3amal', a moody debut single blending raw trap and introspection produced by Morocco's 9ine and released via RAAD Records. Jul 15, 2025 El Nashmy - a rising voice from El Arish, North Sinai - has released his debut single 'Esh El 3amal' through RAAD Records. Produced in cross-border collaboration with Moroccan producer 9ine entirely over texts and BandLab chat, the track is a dark-trap confessional that balances emotional depth with raw sonic grit. Set against a sparse palette of pianos, 808s, and atmospheric textures, El Nashmy delivers autotuned vocals with a haunted calm, layering pain, reflection and ambition in equal measure. Mixed by Hussein El Sherbini and mastered by Marwan Samy, the production sharpens each moment of vulnerability without losing its edge. The accompanying video, directed by Omar Saltah and creatively led by Ali Rabie, mirrors the song's mood with stark visuals and carefully curated styling.
The Verge
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Can the music industry make AI the next Napster?
Sure, everyone hates record labels — but the AI industry has figured out how to make them look like heroes. So that's at least one very impressive accomplishment for AI. AI is cutting a swath across a number of creative industries — with AI-generated book covers, the Chicago Sun-Times publishing an AI-generated list of books that don't exist, and AI-generated stories at CNET under real authors' bylines. The music industry is no exception. But while many of these fields are mired in questions about whether AI models are illegally trained on pirated data, the music industry is coming at the issue from a position of unusual strength: the benefits of years of case law backing copyright protections, a regimented licensing system, and a handful of powerful companies that control the industry. Record labels have chosen to fight several AI companies on copyright law, and they have a strong hand to play. Historically, whatever the tech industry inflicts on the music industry will eventually happen to every other creative industry, too. If that's true here, then all the AI companies that ganked copyrighted material are in a lot of trouble. There are some positive things AI music startups can accomplish — like reducing barriers for musicians to record themselves. Take the artist D4vd, who recorded his breakout hit 'Romantic Homicide' in his sister's closet using BandLab, an app for making music without a studio that includes some AI features. (D4vd began creating music to soundtrack his Fortnite YouTube montages without getting a copyright strike for using existing work.) The point of BandLab is giving more musicians around the world the opportunity to record music, send it into the world, and maybe get paid for their work, says Kuok Meng Ru, the CEO of the app's parent company. AI tools can supercharge that, he says. That use, however, isn't exactly what big-time AI companies like Suno and Udio have in mind. Suno declined to comment for this story. Udio did not respond to a request for comment. Suno and Udio are designed to let music consumers generate new songs with a few words. Users type in, say, 'Prompt: bossa nova song using a wide range of percussion and a horn section about a cat, active, energetic, uptempo, chaotic' and get a song, wholesale, without even writing their own lyrics. The idea that most listeners will do this regularly seems unlikely — making music is more work than just listening to it, even with text prompts — as does the idea that AI will replace people's favorite human artists. (Also, the music is pretty bad.) 'AI flooded the market with it.' A lot of listening is passive consumption, like a person putting on a playlist while doing the dishes or studying, or a business piping background tunes to customers. That background music is up for grabs — not by consumers, but by spammers using these tools. They're already generating consumer-facing slop and putting it on Spotify, effectively crowding out real artists. That seems to be the major use case for these apps. Generating a two-minute song on Udio costs a minimum of eight credits; free users get around 400 credits monthly; for $10 a month, you'll get 1200, the equivalent of, at most, 150 songs. Spotify Premium individual costs $12 a month and gets you just about everything ever recorded, plus audiobooks. Also, it takes many, many fewer clicks to listen to Spotify than it does to generate your own songs — so if you're looking for something to listen to while you cook, Spotify is just easier. But the math there changes if you're looking for background music for your YouTube videos — or anything else that's meant to be listened to publicly. That means AI music threatens people who support themselves by making incidental music for advertisements, or recording 'perfect fit content' for Spotify, or other, less-glamorous work. Taylor Swift's career isn't endangered by AI music — but the real people who make the background music for Chill Beats to Study To, or the hold music you hear on the phone, are. 'I wouldn't want to be [new-age musician] Steven Halpern and have my future career based on meditation music,' says David Hughes, who served as CTO for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for 15 years. He now works as a tech consultant for the music industry at Hughes Strategic. 'AI flooded the market with it. There's no business making it anymore.' As in other creative industries, AI music tools are poised to hollow out the workaday middle of the market. Even new engineering tools have their downsides. Jimmy Iovine, who eventually founded Interscope Records and Beats Electronics, started his career as an audio engineer before making his name by producing Patti Smith's Easter. This is kind of like starting in the mail room and becoming the CEO; if more of the engineering work is done by AI, that removes career paths. The next Jimmy Iovine might not get his start, Hughes says. 'How does anyone apprentice?' About a year ago, the major labels brought suit against Suno and Udio. The fight is about training data; the labels say the companies stole copyrighted work and violated copyright law by using it to build their models. Suno has effectively admitted it trained its AI song generator on copyrighted work in documents filed in court; so has Udio. They're saying it was fair use, a legal framework under which copyrighted work can be used to create new work. Virtually every creative industry is in some kind of similar fight with AI companies. A group of authors is suing Meta, Microsoft, and Bloomberg for allegedly training on their books. The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI. Visual artists have sued Stable Diffusion and Midjourney; Getty Images is also suing Stable Diffusion; Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney. Even Reddit is suing Anthropic. Training data is at issue in all the suits. 'Thou shalt not steal.' So far, the legal takes on AI have been contradictory, and at times, baffling. There doesn't seem to be a consistent through line, so it's hard to know where the law will ultimately end up. Still, music has its own legal history that comes to bear — from unauthorized sampling. That may mean it's entitled to stronger protections. In Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, a case about NWA's sample of Funkadelic's 'Get Off Your Ass and Jam,' the US Court of Appeals ruled that the uncompensated sampling was in violation of copyright law. In the decision, the court found that only the copyright owner could duplicate the work — so all sampling requires a license. Some other courts have rejected that ruling, but it remains influential. There's also Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. Records, in which the US Southern District of New York ruled that Biz Markie's sample of Gilbert O'Sullivan's 'Alone Again (Naturally)' was copyright infringement. The written opinion in the case begins, 'Thou shalt not steal.' 'Some of the sampling cases have suggested that sound recordings might be entitled to stronger protections than other copyrighted works,' says James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell Law School. Those protections may extend beyond sampling to generative AI, especially if the AI outputs too closely resemble copyrighted work. 'From that perspective, music becomes kind of untouchable. You just can't do this kind of work on it.' Music is also complicated — since performances are bound up in rights of publicity. In the case of the fake Drake track, the soundalike may violate Drake's right to publicity. Artists such as Tom Waits and Bette Midler have won suits against more mundane human soundalikes. Proving that someone meant to violate Drake's right to publicity might be even more straightforward if the lawsuit contains the prompt. This may be an easier case for music companies to make As in other AI fair use cases, one of the key questions is whether a derivative work, such as 'BBL Drizzy,' is intended to replace or disrupt a market for an original one. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that Lynn Goldsmith's copyright had been infringed on by Andy Warhol when he screenprinted one of her photos of Prince. One of the key factors was that Vanity Fair had licensed Warhol's work instead of Goldsmith's — and she received no credit or payment. In May, Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter released a pre-publication report that found that AI training in general was not necessarily fair use. In the report, one of the factors considered was whether an AI product supplanted the use of the original. 'The use of pirated collections of copyrighted works to build a training library, or the distribution of such a library to the public, would harm the market for access to those works,' the report said. 'And where training enables a model to output verbatim or substantially similar copies of the works trained on, and those copies are readily accessible by end users, they can substitute for sales of those works.' This may be an easier case for music companies to make than, let's say, ad writers. (What copywriter wants to admit they're so uncreative they can be replaced by a machine, first of all?) Not only are there fewer of them, which allows them to easily negotiate as a bloc, it's simple enough to point to the output of AI music singing Jason Derulo's name, or mimicking 'Great Balls of Fire.' That's pretty clear-cut. Another crucial factor — one that matters particularly to the music industry — was lost licensing opportunities. If copyrighted works are being licensed as AI training data, doing a free-for-all snatch and grab robs rights holders of their ability to participate in that market, the report notes. 'The copying of expressive works from pirate sources in order to generate unrestricted content that competes in the marketplace, when licensing is reasonably available, is unlikely to qualify as fair use,' the report says. The RIAA alleges illegal copying on the front end and infringing outputs on the back end Recently, Anthropic got a ruling in a copyright case that differs from this analysis. According to Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California, using books for training data is fair play — with two big caveats. First, any inputs must be legally acquired, and second, the outputs must be non-infringing. Since Anthropic pirated millions of books, that still leaves the door open for massive damages, even if using the books to train isn't wrong. When it comes to the Suno and Udio suits, the RIAA alleges illegal copying on the front end and infringing outputs on the back end, Grimmelman says. Suno and Udio can introduce evidence to rebut those allegations, but the ruling isn't ideal to knock down the RIAA's suit. It's also not clear Suno can rebut those allegations. 'Suno's training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like,' its lawyers wrote in the filing arguing Suno's training data was fair use. While Udio admits it may have used some copyrighted recordings, its response to the suit doesn't mention how they were acquired; if Udio bought those songs, under the Anthropic case's reasoning, it might be off the hook. But that's not the only pertinent ruling. The very next day, in a case where authors alleged Meta had infringed on their copyright by training on their books, Judge Vince Chhabria directly addressed Alsup's ruling, saying it was based on an 'inept analogy' and brushed aside 'concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on.' While Chhabria found in favor of Meta, he noted that it was because of bad lawyering on the part of the authors' team. Still, the finding is better for music companies on the input side, because it doesn't draw a distinction around piracy, Grimmelman says. It is much, much worse for Suno and Udio on the output side. 'Chhabria holds that 'market dilution' — creating lots of works that compete with the plaintiffs' works — is a plausible theory of market harm,' he says in an email after the ruling. That's also in line with the copyright office's memo. 'We live in a world where everything is licensed.' Suno and Udio have some other trouble; some generative AI companies have been licensing artists' works. By offering nothing for works that other companies have licensed, they are messing up the market. 'The fact that there are existing licensing deals for music training is relevant, if that market is better-developed than the market for licensing books,' Grimmelman says. Chhabria's opinion points out that it's quite difficult to license books for training, because the rights are so fragmented. 'Either finding that there is a market that copyright owners should be able to exploit, or finding that there isn't one, is circular, in that the court's holding tends to reinforce its findings about the market.' That effectively stacks the deck against Suno and Udio, and any other music companies that didn't license their AI training data. Music licenses for AI training cost between $1 and $4 per track. High-quality datasets can cost from $1 to $5 per minute for non-exclusive licenses, and from $5 to $20 per minute for exclusive licenses. Transcription and emotion labeling, among other factors, garner higher prices. And unlike in other industries, music already has an IP copyright and collection system, notes Kuok, of the BandLab recording app. The app has its own AI tool called SongStarter, which lets people who are making music begin with an AI-generated track. Kuok favors licensing music for AI training, and making sure musicians get paid. 'We live in a world where everything is licensed,' Kuok says. 'The solution is an evolution of what existed before.' How to collect, who collects, and how much gets collected strikes Kuok as being open questions, but licensing itself is not. 'We work in an all-rights-reserved world where we believe copyright is an important institution.' 'Everyone knew it was required.' To address that, BandLab has options for its licensing program. Artists can say they are open to AI licensing, which means they'll be contacted if a company wants to license their work. If they agree, their work is then bundled with an assortment of other artists' approved works for the licensing deal, which BandLab negotiates on their behalf. Kuok says Bandlab is discussing training deals now, though he declined to give specifics about the financial components of those deals, or who he was in talks with, Kuok did say there were some other things he considers in negotiations. 'It's important what the use is for,' he says. 'That has to be specified. These are fixed-term contracts, fairly large deals, worth six figures over a multiyear period.' He recommends maintaining as much control as possible over copyrighted work to avoid diluting the value of existing IP. That may be why Suno and Udio are reportedly in talks with the majors to license music for training their models. Other AI companies do already. Ed Newton-Rex, formerly of Stability AI, told me all the music he'd worked with at Stability was licensed; he even quit his position as a vice president at Stability after the company decided training on copyrighted data was fair use. He'd been working on the systems since 2010, and licensing had been the norm until fairly recently, he told me. 'Everyone knew it was the law,' he says. 'Everyone knew it was required.' But after ChatGPT came out, some music AI companies thought they might also just grab whatever existed and let the courts sort it out. 'I don't think it's fair use,' he says. 'Given that gen AI generally competes with what it's trained on, it's a bad thing to take creators' works and outcompete them.' Newton-Rex has also demonstrated ways to get Suno in particular to output music that's strikingly similar to copyrighted work. That, too, is a problem. 'I don't think there's an outcome where this winds up being all fair use,' says Grimmelman.
Irish Times
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Music and artificial intelligence: ‘AI isn't just a new sound. It's a new infrastructure baked into our products and services'
Artificial intelligence creates a dilemma for musicians. On the one hand it could help them develop as artists; on the other, it could seriously damage their livelihoods. Both possibilities are evident in the ways musicians are already using technology, says Martin Clancy. He is the founder of AI:OK , an Irish initiative to promote the ethical use of artificial intelligence in the music industry. He splits AI tools into two categories. The first is generative, which through applications such as Suno and Udio , can create lyrics, melodies, vocals and even complete songs almost instantly, prompted by lyrical themes and music styles that users suggest. The second is complementary, which enhances musicians' work through tools for mixing, mastering, session-player emulation and stem separation (which splits a recorded song into vocals, guitar, drums and so on, enabling users to remove individual components of the track). These tools, Clancy says, 'are now standard in the creative workflow, especially for younger or independent artists. Apple's Logic Pro is a digital audio workstation that comes with four AI-powered session players and stem separation, and is free on all new Mac computers. BandLab , which is used by over 100 million people, opens with a Create a Song with AI button. Another tool, Voice-Swap , allows producers to legally re-sing demos using approved, royalty-sharing artist voice models.' READ MORE Suno and Udio have gained tens of millions of users in the past 18 months, Clancy says. 'That's because the subscription model is cheap – for about $10 per month, Suno offers the user the potential to create 500 complete songs.' What does this fully AI-generated music sound like? One example is Carolina-O, an Udio-created homage to the writer Ernest Hemingway . Another is Verknallt in einen Talahon, which was the first AI-generated song to become a hit in Germany (where its problematic lyrics made a lot of people 'feel somewhat queasy', according to one report). AI systems create music by automatically extracting vast amounts of musical data from websites and other online sources – known as scraping – then analysing and emulating it. Ethically speaking, they should emulate other people's music only with consent from licensed or self-owned material. 'The artist or rights holder should be credited and paid, and the AI use should be disclosed to listeners,' Clancy says. 'Unethical use of AI would be music which is patterned or trained on scraped catalogues and publicly available data without permission,' says Clancy, who began his long career in music as a member of the band In Tua Nua in the 1980s. Artists now using generative AI in an ethical way include Holly Herndon , a Berlin-based American composer who creates music using Max , a visual programming language that lets users create customised instruments and vocal processes. Taryn Southern created her album I Am AI using several artificial-intelligence-based tools. The veteran musician and producer Brian Eno 's approach to creativity, Clancy says, is driven by curiosity and a commitment to experimentation. Are any Irish musicians following Eno's lead? 'There is a noticeable gap in artists doing anything interesting with this,' Clancy says. 'That's surprising and concerning, but it could be a 1975 moment, like it was before punk rock came along to shake things up. So far I'm not seeing it happening, yet I sense people are beginning to realise the possibilities.' Eno coined the term 'generative music', says Clancy. 'But he wasn't speaking about it in terms of AI systems – more in the areas of chance, randomness and order disarray. He views the recording studio as a musical instrument, as opposed to how most of us see it, as a technological processing plant.' Eno, Herndon and Southern use AI in principled and intelligent ways, valuing consent, creativity and copyright, Clancy says. Other creations have taken a different route, including Heart on My Sleeve, an AI-generated song from April 2023 that was written and produced by a TikTok user known only as Ghostwriter977 and features vocals that sound remarkably similar to Drake and the Weeknd . Both artists are hugely popular: the former has sold more digital singles in the US than any other artist; the latter set a record in 2024 as the artist with the most songs to have more than a billion streams on Spotify. Universal Music Group, to whose Republic Records label Drake and the Weeknd are signed, filed a takedown notice with multiple online platforms within two weeks of Heart on My Sleeve's release – by then the song was already a sizeable viral success, with more than 600,000 streams on Spotify, 275,000 views on YouTube and 15 million views on TikTok. For every use of technology that prompts a moral or legal dilemma, there is another with a more welcome outcome, such as the 'Abbatars' that stand in for the Swedish pop stars at the Abba Voyage show in London. The 3D projections of Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad are generated using motion-capture and machine-learning processes created by Industrial Light & Magic . The visual-effects company, which was founded by the film-maker George Lucas in 1975, put the four musicians in motion-capture suits, then used 160 cameras to film their movements and facial expressions. It fed its five weeks of data into a series of processing and modelling systems to create the digital (and de-aged) versions of the band in their 1979 heyday. Abba Voyage, which cost about €165 million to create (and also involved the work of 140 animators at Industrial Light & Magic), is a playful and transparent development of the live-concert experience, Clancy says. 'The technology dazzles but the event is firmly in service of nostalgia and showmanship, and it also employs a 10-piece live band. It's a recent example of how the marriage of live music and AI can work.' Clancy also points to virtual concerts by late artists such as Tupac Shakur, at Coachella in 2012, and the more recent hologram-generated shows featuring visualisations of Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston and Elvis Presley as further examples of AI establishing itself in popular culture. Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of our daily lives, Clancy says. 'AI isn't just a new sound,' he says. 'It's a new infrastructure that is baked into pretty much all forms of our products and services, which makes it intuitively personal.' Our smartphones are crammed with forms of AI that we already take for granted, such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, predictive text, facial recognition, customer-service chatbots, banking apps and Google Maps. (Possibly less usefully, Mercedes-Benz and have developed Sound Drive , an AI-powered in-car entertainment system that will remix your tunes and create 'musical expressions' of your acceleration, braking and steering.) 'The idea of human beings viewing AI technology as, possibly, an existential threat to their existing work, but also saying, 'Let's do something interesting with it,' is important,' Clancy says. 'That, however, takes an imaginative leap.' This won't happen of its own accord. Clancy hopes that AI:OK's 'literacy programme', a first-step educational tool based on the recommendations of the Government's Irish Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council, will, for example, help to create accelerator programmes to provide artificial-intelligence start-ups with funding, resources and mentoring. Clancy understands why some people are apprehensive about artificial intelligence. 'But the one thing you can't do is to think you can stop it,' he says. 'The positive argument, the positive message, is that AI is just a new technological development. It's business as usual, so don't worry.'
Fox Sports
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox Sports
The story behind the viral LeBron James songs
When LeBron James was on the verge of becoming the first NBA player to score 50,000 points, a 24-year-old named Vincent James felt a burning desire to celebrate the achievement, which may never happen again. So, he decided to make a song. Two weeks before James' historic milestone, Vincent scoured the internet until he found a beat that he loved. Then, on March 4, he received a notification on his phone: James had scored his 50,000th point with a 3-pointer against the New Orleans Pelicans. It was go-time. That evening, Vincent ran to Best Buy to buy a pair of wired headphones. He opened an app called BandLab and tried to record a tribute. The only thing was, he couldn't think of any lyrics. But he didn't let that stop him. Vincent sang "LeBron, LeBron, LeBron James" over and over again in a rhythm and blues style. He has a soulful voice. He harmonized with himself and added a few layers. The whole thing took him 20 minutes. "I'm not really good when it comes to lyrics," Vincent told FOX Sports. "So, I couldn't really come up with anything else." That video now has 6.7 million views on TikTok. And it started a viral movement, with dozens of other creators making tribute songs to the Lakers superstar, sparking a collection called "LeBronify." The phenomenon has even reached James. "Yeah, I mean it's almost impossible [not to hear]," James said, flashing a smile when asked about the music after the Lakers beat the Houston Rockets on Monday. "But my youngest son Bryce actually showed me one, I think it was yesterday. Yeah, it was yesterday. And we got a good laugh at it. But there's quite a few out there, for sure." For Vincent, who's a junior at UEI College in Phoenix studying to be an electrician, it has been a surreal experience. He had posted songs on TikTok before, but he was always overcome with embarrassment and quickly deleted them. But this was different. When his girlfriend first heard his LeBron song, instead of getting annoyed by his loud music as she usually did, she started bobbing her head and even acknowledged that [two] words were immediately stuck in her head. It had the same effect on others. LaVar Ball, the father of two NBA players and a famous rapper, posted a video on Instagram of him singing to Vincent's song after undergoing surgery to have his right foot amputated. Internet creators had a field day with it too, using his song to create funny videos, including one in which a bride walks down the aisle to the LeBron song. It was captioned: "When you let him choose your entry song," By popular demand, Vincent recently added the song to both Spotify and Apple Music. Vincent is still in shock. "I can't even describe the feeling," Vincent told FOX Sports. "It's like when you tell a joke that you're not realizing is funny, an off-hand joke, but you have the whole room laughing and you get that warm feeling inside. That's the best way I can describe it. It's something I did without thinking too much about it." Over the last few weeks, dozens of other LeBron-inspired songs have popped up on the internet, including remixes to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," Panic! at the Disco's "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" and R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly," to name a few. One of the most popular remixes was done by Shannon Blake, who rewrote Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" to honor James with "Man on the Lakers." It's incredibly catchy and takes you through the story of the Lakers this season, including them trading Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis. The song has gotten millions of views. It was shared by rapper Snoop Dogg. It was performed by the men's choir at Baylor University. Someone even recently sent him $23 over Zelle in honor of James, who wears No. 23. For Blake, a 32-year-old who works for Amazon Fresh and creates music in his free time, it has all been a dream come true. He freestyled the song in 30 minutes and can't believe the acclaim it's receiving. Heck, even one of the co-writers of "Man in the Mirror," Siedah Garrett, even commented on his remix, writing, "Love these clever lyrics to my song." Blake's ultimate goal was for James to hear his song. "I believe LeBron is the greatest basketball player to ever touch a basketball," Blake told FOX Sports. The fact that all of this has reached James is even more interesting because the 40-year-old acknowledged he's not even on one of the platforms where they're going viral. "My son, they all on TikTok," James said. "I'm not on TikTok. So they showed me." James, who's the face of the NBA, has seen thousands of tributes from fans over his 22 years in the league. But having songs written about him is new. And it was all started by a young man who just had to celebrate his idol's latest accomplishment. For Vincent, it was just a passion project. A way for him to honor his favorite player. He never expected it to catch fire. And honestly, while that has been amazing, there's something that has meant much more to him. "The fact that I did something that created a big enough wave that it reached somebody I look up to daily has heard it, is just insane," he said. "I honestly can't believe it. It just blows my mind away." Melissa Rohlin is an NBA writer for FOX Sports. She previously covered the league for Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Times, the Bay Area News Group and the San Antonio Express-News. Follow her on Twitter @ melissarohlin . FOLLOW Follow your favorites to personalize your FOX Sports experience LeBron James Los Angeles Lakers National Basketball Association recommended Get more from National Basketball Association Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more
