Daan Archer & Pål Bråtelund Identifying AI in Music

Okay sort of it's early morning guys we're at survive a conference about music tech in all way um Paul we've already met on the podcast Dan this is the first time of you being on um the reason why I really want to you on is me and Paul we talked about collaboration we talked about AI there's a lot of things happening but there's a lot of things happening in AI right now and you are one of the experts and we're both very curious but po you Den have had a lot of really deep talks about this what is your current thoughts on AI right now well we had a whole conference day yesterday about Ai and it was spoken about as if you were at the medical conference and everyone was talking about cancer but not which cancer uh so everyone was like now talking every very broad term so what I was what we were discussing after yesterday uh a lot was it's a lot of different things so the creators were obsessed like which tool tools are allowed or cool to use uh the lawyer is very obsessed about what seeds those tools um and then we also heard about that we if you are using Creator tools that are a driven you have to

Flag yourself uh and it might end up in a lower T royalty rate so which like what's the realism in this and then we of course uh obsessed about the infrastructure uh perhaps delivering on what the legal um people are talking about like when the legal framework is in place someone has to deliver um the tools for royalty payments looking after it detecting fraud detecting the music when it's being used all this um hidden perhaps boring to people that's completely um utterly important to have in place so um so yeah and that's where Dan you come into the picture I met you

Around one and a half years ago at your Sonic and you have a company called copyight Delta um you describe it to be the plumbing layer of the music industry or can you can you tell me a bit about what your philosophy is on this area yeah I want to coach Scott Goen on that because it was him saying the plumbing layer because it is it is needed that somebody's willing to BU to build like a connecting glue at the bottom that allows everybody to uh be independent while collaborating and make more money MH and um becoming from AI so I started my AI studies in the 90s and I became an AI Diplomat for the Dutch government in Japan in 2006 oh way too early but I've always wanted to build something called accountable Ai and if you do blockchain right like we're more on the banking blockchain s and the accountability blockchain site if you combine that with AI you can you can connect those dots and have like a glue layer under it and in the case of AI the other thing we were talking about is the so regulation is very top down it's very wooly and then infrastructure at the bottom how do you connect those dots and especially if you

Have like audio detection companies on the isrc and then we do detection on lyrics then you have iswc so you can glue those together and then you maybe have 20 other parties there and in the middle you have the producers who want to use the AI tools to create new sounds but there has to be some accountability and then uh but you also have some AI tools to fight AI so it's like top down regulation bottom up infrastructure and then AI fighting Ai and in the meantime people can produce new content with it yeah and plumbing is actually a very good uh way of looking at it because it is plumbing and the pipes and the things that we have underground today were created well first in the publishing era of like 1900 until 1950 and then the mafia came along in New York and owned the plumbing and those pipes and wires are getting old right that's the major label structure and MB publishing structure and since then in the digital age it's exploded with new opportunities the plumbing is the same and it's Rusty and it's copper and it's old and it doesn't really work uh for the future so

This is what it's exciting about the new Plumbing over the music industry yeah because also if you look at now um I think last year at Spotify 50% of all songs were independently own artist so if you look at the amount of um fractionalized co-ownership that you have in there and in a digital supply chain you can optimize all that it's like Excel on steroids if you do it well but we don't we want to get rid of the black magic but just have Excel on steroids yeah and but therefore you need like the end points who are the starting points the kyc of the artist and the creatives and the labels after that all of us can digitize this into new worlds but also licensing into AI engines licensing into Virtual Worlds all these new untapped markets that can also be a threat yeah because that's the underlying thing is like AI is so many things and you just talked about at the start of this talk and I was playing witho at AI this morning just having fun and that's a completely different thing but the thing about that is how do you pay the actual ride holders and that's like the thing there's no Plumbing there is no existant of keeping

That accountable so what you're saying is together with blockchain together with bank volting blockchain kind of systems you can use AI to make sure that these rights are identified and subsequently re reated from the works yeah there's very important it's so you have multiple types of blockchain so this is not Bitcoin blockchain style type because those are fully public you don't want that so it has to be a different type of way um together with some banks we're actually working on connecting into the financial system um the other thing is we're working with music societies on how can you prove later that you created the lyrics M and um because right now if you only the title but then software systems run on things like lyrics like Melodies like songs and you're in the out detection field we more look on the on the lyrics type of site and the melody side and you have to start measuring those if the three of us would come up with yesterday you want to be able to prove later that we came up with that yeah because otherwise you can never create accountability for those software systems and maybe it's nice to mention

To everybody also is that a AI is not black magic like all those neural networks they've got like multiple nodes things in the middle and you have parameters and the term in software land is it's um AI is like curve fitting but in high dimensional data sets so it's not like if you imagine 2D 3D 4D 10,000 D AI is really good at finding the threat in there wonderful let the AI company do that and those parameter settings is their IP but from the music perspective if you've got input you've trained on 10,000 isrc a million iswcs or maybe the other way around maybe hundreds maybe two maybe your own personal set but the output is some piece of song and then if you have all the MRT companies to dissect those songs have you used some lyrics from that song or some Snippets from a recording M and so that's the type of tools we're expor when you I've not everyone's familiar with mrts or music recognition technology so and this is also not so much talked about the from the concerned organization and concerned legal framework people is that yeah you can use AI also to recognize all these deep fakes and all the plays out there

And scraping whatever use that's out on the platform or the platforms are reporting like you showed us in Roblox yesterday it's like when something is played there's an action in the code saying like we're playing music and it's licensed so and to automate all this like not some of it's not even AI it's just reporting um and then we use AI to detect the more difficult things so there will be tons of great applications of AI I think we will call them Tools in two years uh right now we're just wrapping it in a topic because we are engaged in it but it's just code and tools and smart way of doing things it's like sampling on steroids but it linked to somebody's IP that has created something and the other thing is that came up is that if we want to Value human creativity that's why we take this effort if we want to live in a robot World great then give up with IP and go that direction hopefully not and then we value human creativity and we create some tools for that but I think also the rights organizations need to do radical collaboration yeah they are competing uh in a world where uh some person sit with the isrc

Code and some sits with the iswc code and some has the actual lyric and some has the actual recording and some has the actual credits and uh it's uh boring for a Creator to fill them in everywhere y um so it's like there must be some Central repository of metadata assets rights um and they need to get together and collaborate on this because or else we don't have the raw materials we can we can take multiple sources throw them together and make try to make sense of it that's what we've been doing for the last 30 years but uh but the organizations need to become better at collaborating I can give some credits to The society's Rew workers there's a few here in Europe are fantastic and so I want to say if there's artists listening to this and managers get registered yeah you get registered um wearn from ABBA gets paid because people know is identifiers so get registered because otherwise in the digital value chain we cannot help you MH yeah this was a short commentary on AI and this is something I'm going to dive a lot deeper on the podcast and I really want to thank you the conference for having us show for having us

All it's been really interesting to have these talks but this technological development in the industry is going to make some serious changes or require some serious changes and I think we really need to Industry understand how proactive we need to be this yeah one thing that is very interesting is because since the music industry is so vocal if you look at the speed in Washington and in Brussels that people are going through this legislation it is so fast so many compliments to the mus to the music industry because everybody's fully on top of it you've got EXA that ecsa those organizations and um those are many compliments and uh and you have to Dan I know we're going to hear a lot from you in the future with copyright Delta uh you are one of the most interesting companies in the world right now I would say for sure and thank you for joining us for this short talk um It's All Conference style so now in five minute we needs to go to talk so we'll just wrap it up quickly this is our commentary on a thought we had yesterday yeah thank you for being on it super cool okay we'll continue the conversation offline right but [Music]

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