A new bill has been introduced by the House of Representatives, aiming to help independent musicians negotiate with AI developers and streaming platforms. According to NME, the bill is predominately a revision of the Project Working Musician Bill passed by the Representative of North Carolina, Deborah Ross.
The details of the new bill aim to allow independent musicians to “collectively bargain for royalty rates” with major streaming platforms, such as Spotify. Antitrust laws would not intervene in the musicians’ collective bargaining.
However, the majority of musicians have remained unprotected by significant streaming platforms. The independent musicians have yet to be compensated fairly, and there is little to no effort in negotiating better terms.
Many streaming platforms have labeled independent musicians as “independent contractors,” consequently entitling the musicians not to have legal protections as opposed to being labeled as “employees.”
The new House bill seeks to stress the importance of protecting songs from being generated by AI. The representative of North Carolina has provided her thoughts on the dangers of AI development in music: “AI threatens the creator — finding the person or entity that has co-opted your work and turned it into something else and then going after them is so onerous. That’s one of the reasons for this bill — to allow people to do this collaboratively. We need to do this sooner than later. We’re seeing this threat every single day.”
Many singer-songwriters have provided mixed reactions to the use of AI for music.
Previously, music streaming platform Spotify recently addressed its royalty system where subscribers could make money from streaming a self-recorded 30-second track.
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