ai in music

Music AI solutions already represent a $300 million industry, and that sum could top $3 billion by 2028, per a new study. Photo Credit: Possessed Photography

According to a new study, music accounts for nearly 10 percent of generative AI’s global market volume – to the tune of roughly $300 million, which could crack $3 billion by 2028.

These and several other noteworthy figures came to light in a just-published “AI and Music” report. Commissioned by France’s SACEM and Germany’s GEMA, the analysis is based upon, besides 16 “expert interviews,” the survey responses of 15,073 “people who work full-time or part-time as authors or for music publishers,” per the resource.

Returning to the mentioned stats, AI and Music has placed generative artificial intelligence’s 2023 revenue at $3.7 billion. And as the heretofore unprecedented technology is still in its infancy – and attracting all manner of investments, including in the industry – the music-specific sum could experience an average of 60 percent annual growth en route to hitting $3.1 billion by 2028, according to the document.

“This means that in only a few years the market will reach a size that corresponds to 28% of global music copyright collections in 2022,” GEMA and SACEM noted.

Also by 2028, 27 percent “of music creators’ revenues will be at risk due to generative AI,” as determined by the study, with “an estimated potential damage” in excess of $1 billion for 2028 alone.

Bearing in mind the figure, respondents didn’t hesitate to express concerns about the possibility that AI will disrupt the creative landscape and their livelihoods. 71 percent “of music authors and creators in France and Germany” were worried as of Q4 2023 that AI could ultimately inhibit professionals’ ability to make “a living from their work,” according to the report.

Nevertheless, 35 percent of respondents – and 51 percent of respondents under the age of 35 – said they’d already “used AI technologies of some kind in their work with music and creation in general.” A discouraging total of just 45 percent of respondents indicated that they refused to use AI (19 percent) or would rather not do so (26 percent).

Additionally, notwithstanding the fact that almost half the survey’s participants therefore disclosed the personal use or openness to the personal use of AI in music (seven percent were unsure of where they stood), a decisive 64 percent agreed “that the risks of AI use outweigh its potential opportunities.”

And unsurprisingly, 95 percent of respondents – or about 14,320 of the 15,073 persons surveyed – “demand that AI providers should be obliged to disclose when they use copyrighted works as training data.”

Despite the near-universal industry support for training disclosures (and the compensation that may result from the common-sense approach), leading AI operations remain committed to the belief that the ingestion of protected media into large language models constitutes fair use. Stateside, the Federal Trade Commission this week launched an investigation into generative AI giants including OpenAI and Anthropic.