YouTube’s Dream Track – An Emerging Artist

Written by Swasti Mehta.

In Short: YouTube is allegedly in talks with record labels to facilitate the development of its AI tool for music content creation.

What is Going On?
AI is flooding our lives at unimaginable speeds, and it was only a matter of time before it invaded the music industry too. YouTube, which is owned by Google LLC, is reportedly holding negotiations with record labels to procure artists’ voices to train its AI tool. Last year, YouTube introduced ‘Dream Track’, a text-to-music generation tool. However, only around ten artists consented to the use of their voices to train the AI – some popular ones being Demi Lovato and John Legend.

Dream Track is capable of generating music in accordance with a user’s text input. So, it could potentially generate a short clip based on the prompt – ‘Taylor Swift’s lyrics with Liam Gallagher’s voice.’ However, its abilities are not endless (yet) because a major part of creating an AI tool is the collection of training datasets, and only a minority of artists are enthusiastic about this development due to the threat it poses to their livelihood. At the same time, the quality of AI tools depends upon the size of its training material i.e., the greater the number of consenting artists, the better Dream Track will do! Therefore, YouTube is negotiating to pay record labels money in exchange for convincing more of their artists to participate in the training of Dream Track.

How Does This Impact Law Firms?