The post AI Artist Signs Million-Dollar Record Deal appeared first on Consequence.
Human lyricist Telisha Jones and her AI artist Xania Monet have together signed a multi-million dollar record deal, Billboard reports.
Jones released the Xania Monet album Unfolded on August 8th, and since then the TikTok-earnest power ballad “How Was I Supposed to Know?” has racked up 5 million streams across YouTube and Spotify. The Xania Monet voice isn’t too far off from Beyoncé’s, perhaps with a dash of Alicia Keys, and the similarities to Queen Bey are even stronger in the Southern pronunciation of words like “strength.” While Jones claims to write all of the lyrics, she uses the AI platform Suno to transform the words into full songs.
The deal is reportedly worth $3 million and comes from Hallwood Media, best known for representing chart-topping producers like Murda Beatz and Sounwave. From Hallwood’s perspective, the deal carries a fair bit of risk. To start, the YouTube comments suggest that many fans don’t realize Xania Monet is an AI creation, which could lead to backlash as the news trickles out.
AI is also an active area of litigation. Platforms from ChatGPT to Suno were trained on copyrighted material in a way that some have argued is illegal. Just yesterday record labels escalated a lawsuit against Suno, claiming that the platform was trained on songs ripped from YouTube. And earlier this month Anthropic, the makers of Claude, settled a lawsuit brought by book authors for $1.5 billion. Beyoncé hasn’t sued over the Xania Monet voice, but given the other lawsuits we’ve seen, she might have a case.
Even if Suno doesn’t get sued into oblivion, copyright law could prevent Hallwood from monetizing Xavier Monet. The US Copyright Office sanctions humans using AI as an “assistive tool,” but has said that they would not grant copyrights where “expressive elements are determined by a machine.” With Telisha Jones providing the lyrics but AI handling the composition and vocal performance, the Copyright Office has its work cut out for it.
AI songs have had success with playlist placement and TikTok, but so far there’s little evidence that generated music can capitalize on viral moments. In June the AI band The Velvet Sundown made waves for getting over 500,000 monthly Spotify listens, but just a few months later, they’ve already lost about 40% of their streams. It seems difficult to maintain an audience — let alone grow it — when the ‘artist’ in the pictures can’t interact with fans.
Popular Posts
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
