Warner Music Group (WMG) will begin an artificial intelligence (AI) music venture with technology start-up Suno - a year after it sued the firm in a landmark case. As part of the settlement agreement struck between the two firms, Warner will let users create AI-generated music on Suno using the voices, names and likeness of artists who opt-in to the programme. The record label, which represents artists like Dua Lipa, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, was among several music giants like Sony Music that sued Suno and a similar platform called Udio. AI-generated content has been controversial, with many artists voicing concerns that it could undermine human songwriters. Starting next year, Suno will roll out new advanced and licensed models to its generative-AI music platform, which allows users to create music based on simple descriptions, said Warner in a statement .

Spotify is rolling out a Music Pro tier later this year that will give users access to higher-quality audio and remixing tools, according to Bloomberg. The tier will reportedly cost users 6 per month on top of their 12 Premium subscription, but they'll be priced differently across regions and will be cheaper in less-developed markets. Many long-time Spotify subscribers, however, will probably say that they'll believe it when they see it. The service teased a high-fidelity streaming option way back in 2017 and had confirmed that it was working to provide users with access to lossless audio in 2021. Several reports about the feature's availability had come out over the years after the company's confirmation. In 2024, Bloomberg also reported that HiFi streaming is expected to arrive before the year ended as a 5 add-on.

Thanks to a string of leaks and Google's own teases -- usually following said leaks -- we know we'll get the official reveal of the Pixel 9 lineup. The Pixel 9 and 9 Pro will be straight-up successors to the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro but rumors suggest Google will add a Pixel 9 Pro XL, with a larger screen. All three of the phones are expected to have a redesigned, chonky camera module and possibly even a new chipset. Alongside all those phones, we're expecting a lot more news on Gemini, Google's flavor of AI powered assistant, and Android 15. More leaks and rumors point to updated smartwatches and wireless buds too.

When most tech companies are challenged with a lawsuit, the expected defense is to deny wrongdoing. To give a reasonable explanation of why the business' actions were not breaking any laws. Music AI startups Udio and Suno have gone for a different approach: admit to doing exactly what you were sued for. And that's because its training data "includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet," which likely include millions of illegal copies of songs. But the company is taking the line that its scraping falls under the umbrella of fair use.

AI companies have pillaged the internet for training data, and many websites and data set owners have started restricting the ability to scrape their websites. We've also seen a backlash against the AI sector's practice of indiscriminately scraping online data, in the form of users opting out of making their data available for training and lawsuits from artists, writers, and the New York Times, claiming that AI companies have taken their intellectual property without consent or compensation. My colleague James O'Donnell dissects the lawsuits in his story and points out that these lawsuits could determine the future of AI music. But this moment also sets an interesting precedent for all of generative AI development. Thanks to the scarcity of high-quality data and the immense pressure and demand to build even bigger and better models, we're in a rare moment where data owners actually have some leverage.

Major music labels are taking on AI startups that they believe trained on their songs without paying. The filings against the AI companies reportedly demand injunctions against future use and damages of up to 150,000 per infringed work. The suits appear aimed at establishing licensed training as the only acceptable industry framework for AI moving forward -- while instilling fear in companies that train their models without consent. Suno AI and Udio AI (Uncharted Labs run the latter) are startups with software that generates music based on text inputs. The former is a partner of Microsoft for its CoPilot music generation tool.

The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. The plaintiffs seek damages up to 150,000 per work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is filed in Massachusetts, while the case against Udio's parent company Uncharted Inc. was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request to comment. "Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it's'fair' to copy an artist's life's work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all," Recording Industry Association of America chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.

In this paper, we explore the intriguing similarities between the structure of a discrete neural network, such as a spiking network, and the composition of a piano piece. While both involve nodes or notes that are activated sequentially or in parallel, the latter benefits from the rich body of music theory to guide meaningful combinations. We propose a novel approach that leverages musical grammar to regulate activations in a spiking neural network, allowing for the representation of symbols as attractors. By applying rules for chord progressions from music theory, we demonstrate how certain activations naturally follow others, akin to the concept of attraction. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of modulating keys to navigate different basins of attraction within the network. Ultimately, we show that the map of concepts in our model is structured by the musical circle of fifths, highlighting the potential for leveraging music theory principles in deep learning algorithms.

Sir Lucian Grainge, the chairman and C.E.O. of Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the world, is curious, empathetic, and, if not exactly humble, a master of the humblebrag. His superpower is his humanity. A sixty-three-year-old Englishman, who was knighted in 2016 for his contributions to the music industry and has topped Billboard's Power 100 list of music-industry players several times in the past decade, Grainge is compact and a bit chubby, with alert eyes behind owlish glasses. He isn't trying to be noticed. He presides over a public company worth more than fifty billion dollars, but he could be a small-business owner who sells music in a London shop, as did his father, Cecil.

Google and Universal Music are negotiating a deal on how to license the voices and melodies of artists for artificial intelligence-generated songs. The artists would have a choice to opt in to the process. According to the Financial Times, the talks are at an early stage and there are no plans for an immediate product launch. The talks come after a popular and recent trend of fans using AI programs to make deepfake music that imitates artists' voices and cadence so it appears they are singing other people's songs or even new material. On TikTok, there are several viral videos of convincingly mimicked AI-made tracks of artists, usually without the consent of the artists' voices the creators are making.