Why won’t AI be able to replicate Taylor Swift? Because it doesn’t have breakups

Toronto – June 20, 2024

AI music won’t be able to replicate Taylor Swift, a leading music industry executive has said – because her success is so dependent on her life experiences.

SoundExchange president and CEO, Michael Huppe (pictured above, middle) told an audience at Collision that, despite extraordinary advances in AI music-making, the human side of song-writing was still the “critical” element.

“It’s hard to imagine a Taylor Swift sized success without a human and the backstory and the breakups and the growing up and how she performs,” said Michael.

Huppe also pointed to the success of the singer’s Eras tour, which had earned more than US$1bn even before the end of 2023 – halfway through its 152-show global run. 

Following the inaugural US leg of Eras, the US Travel Association estimated that the tour’s total economic impact likely exceeded US$10 billion. “Her tour is one of the biggest ever: and there may be certain parts of the industry where that human element may be less important, but we believe the human element is critical,” said Michael.

However Michael added that artists do need to protect their music from the AI industry, which was training its models on their work – without paying for the privilege. 

“All these AI tools have to train their algorithm on something, and they’ve basically gone out and hoovered up everything out there,” Michael said. “In fact in 2021 I think OpenAI actually ran out of things to scrape, and so they started making their own.” 

“But they need to train on something – whether it’s photographs, music, language – and much of that stuff is copyrighted, so you’re basically training your business and your business model on stuff that other people own. So the ethical way to do it is to do it with permission and licensing and that’s how you should do it.”

Michael continued: “When you think about streaming in the US, it’s 85 percent of the record music industry. Not that long ago CDs was that number, so it’s a highly technical process, how it’s played, how it’s reported, how it’s detected and one way artists can protect themselves is to make sure all of their metadata around whatever they create is accurate, because that’s how you get paid.”

However Chromeo musician David Macklovitch, also known as Dave 1, warned that musicians cannot realistically currently protect their music from AI scraping.

“You can’t,” said David. “AI is scraping from absolutely everything – and the people who create AI software, they’re not going to tell us where they’re scraping from.”

“So you have the entire world’s music that’s on the internet and AI generative software is taking from that to, quote unquote, ‘create an infinity of new pieces of music at your fingertips and following your prompts’.”

“So in terms of protection, we’re kind of playing catch-up.”

However Dave 1 added that human musicians could still succeed against AI music because of their ability to change, challenge convention and break rules. 

“AI software can make perfect music, so if I type in car chase music, it will generate a nearly perfect car chase score but as musicians, our job is to break the rules, it’s not to make perfect. It’s to make things that are quirky, idiosyncratic, kind of wrong and kind of right.”

The comments came ahead of Michael Huppe’s testimony before the US congress next week calling for payment for performers whose music is played on AMFM radio.

Michael said: “In the US, over the air terrestrial radio, AMFM radio, does not pay the performers. When Chromeo for example is played on an FM radio, they make nothing. 

“It’s a US$15 billion industry and the US is the only industrialized democratic country that does that in the world, it is one of the biggest inequities out there so we are fighting to try to get creators paid because just like with FM or with AI, they are the business model of these FM broadcasters should participate in the revenue.”

Michael and Dave 1’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on the future of the music industry at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:
● Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
● Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
● Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
● Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
● Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
● Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
● Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
● Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
● Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
● Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

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Useful links
Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/
Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit 
Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf
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