Billie Eillish and 200 Artists Sign Open Letter Against Irresponsible AI: Generative AI Music Market To Be Worth $3BN By 2028
Billie Eillish is among more than 200 members of the music industry to sign the letter. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
Key Takeaways
- More than 200 musicians have signed a letter calling for AI developers to stop creating tools that threaten their rights and livelihood.
- Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj and the estates of Bob Markey and Frank Sinatra signed the letter.
- By 2028, the market for AI music services is forecast to be worth over $3 billion.
More than 200 artists and music industry representatives have signed an open letter expressing their concerns over the use of generative AI tools that threaten to “devalue the rights of human artists.”
Yet, despite the objections of musicians, the growing market for synthetic voice and other AI-generated music shows no signs of slowing down.
AI-Generated Music Market on Track to Increase 10x in 5 Years
According to a recent study , music-based applications including AI voice generation platforms made up 8% of the $3.7 billion generative AI market in 2023.
By the year 2028, however, the report forecasts the market for AI music services to grow more than tenfold, from $300 million to over $3 billion.
In other words, in less than 5 years, the market will reach a size that corresponds to 28% of global revenues from global copyright collections in 2022, potentially reducing artist’s income by nearly a billion dollars a year.
Concerns Over AI Impact on Royalties
Echoing similar concerns voiced by writers, publishers and visual artists, the letter, which was signed by Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, J Balvin and more than 200 of their peers in the music industry, raised the issue of AI developers’ use of copyrighted materials as training data:
“Some of the biggest and most powerful companies are, without permission, using our work to train AI models. These efforts are directly aimed at replacing the work of human artists with massive quantities of AI-created “sounds” and “images” that substantially dilate the royalty pools that are paid out to artists”, the letter states.
To date, the music industry has not seen the same kind of copyright disputes that have pitted publishers and visual artists against AI developers in court. However, that could simply be because the market for AI-generated music remains comparatively undeveloped compared to the widespread adoption of chatbots and image-generation tools.
Musicians Call For Restraint in AI Development
Given their concerns, signatories to the letter called upon AI developers to “cease the use of artificial intelligence to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”
While it acknowledged that AI tools had a role to play in the production of music, the letter stated that “unfortunately, some platforms and developers are employing AI to sabotage creativity and undermine artists, songwriters, musicians and rightsholders.”
As such, the letter asked developers of AI music generation tools to ensure their platforms deliver a fair deal for artists that doesn’t leave them out of work or deny them compensation for their labor.
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