The ethics of AI music became a heated topic at industry panels in 2024, sparking debates around the notion of “fair use”. AI music tech companies have admitted to training their models on copyright protected music, without a license or consent from rights holders in the RIAA.
Over ten thousand major figures from the industry, including Thom Yorke of Radiohead, signed a shared statement near the end of the year, expressing their belief that “unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”
During September 2024, Billboard broke a story about Michael Smith, a man accused of $10M in wire fraud. He published large quantities of algorithmically generated music and used bot farms to stream that audio to turn a profit. Billboard’s story stoked concerns that instant song generation will pollute DSPs and siphon revenue away from “real” artists and labels.
There has been little to no discussion of AI MIDI generation software or its ethical implications. Instant song generators appeal to a substantially larger market size and pose a more direct threat to DSPs. MIDI tools are generally considered too niche for a non-technical audience.
The ethical advantages of AI MIDI generation
There are several ethical advantages to generating MIDI files instead of raw audio.
First, MIDI’s small file size conserves energy during training, generation, and file storage. That means that it’s not only cheaper to operate, but may have a lower environmental impact.
Second, independent artists are partnering with AI MIDI companies to create fine-tuned models that replicate their style, and selling access to those models as a vector for passive income.
AI audio models are fine tuned with artists as well, but the major AI song generation companies are scraping audio from the internet or licensing stock music in bulk. They don’t partner with artists on fine-tunes, which means labels and rights holders will make the most money.
In this article, I’ll review a couple big AI music ethics stories from 2024 and celebrate a few MIDI generation companies that have been working hard to set up fair deals with artists.
RIAA: Narrowing AI music ethics to licensing and copyright
Debates over the ethics of AI music reached a boiling point in June 2024, in a historic lawsuit by the RIAA against Suno and Udio. Both companies scraped copyright-protected music from the internet and used that audio to train their own commercial AI song generators.
Suno and Udio currently grant their users unlimited commercial license for audio created on their platform. This means vocalists can create albums without musicians and producers. Media creatives can add music to their productions without sync licensing fees.
Labels are predictably upset by Suno and Udio’s commercial license clause, which they feel competes directly with their own sync libraries and threatens to erode their bottom line.
To be clear, it’s not that the music industry wants to put a stop to generative AI music. On the contrary, they want to train AI models on their own music and create a new revenue source.
UMG struck up a partnership with AI music generator Klay, announced October 2024. If Klay can compete with Suno and Udio, it will likely be regarded as the “ethical alternative” and set a standard for other major labels to follow.
Fairly Trained: A system of accountability for data licensing
The non-profit organization Fairly Trained and their founder Ed Newton Rex have put a spotlight on AI audio model training and the need for better licensing standards. They offer an affordable certification for audio companies that want to signal compliance with industry expectations.
Watch the discussion below to learn more about Fairly Trained:
AI MIDI companies with Fairly Trained certifications
At least two AI MIDI companies have been certified Fairly Trained:
Lemonaide Music is a state of the art AI MIDI and audio generation plugin. They partner with music producers to fine tune models on their MIDI stems. When users purchase a model from the app store, artists receive a 40% revenue share. In early November 2024, Lemonaide announced a new partnership with Spawn, bringing advanced sound design and color field visualization to the MIDI generation experience.
Soundful Music is a B2C music generation service that includes MIDI stems as part of their core product. They hire musicians to create sound templates and render variations of that content from a cloud service. Soundful is a web browser application.
Both of these companies have proven that they sourced their training data responsibly.
The environmental cost of AI music generation
I spoke to several machine learning experts who agreed that MIDI training, generation and storage should consume less energy than raw audio generation, by virtue of the file size alone.
There is no public data on energy consumption at top AI audio generation companies. What we do have are reports on the data centers where those operations are held. Journalists like Karen Hao have ramped up coverage of the data centers housing our generative model operations and demonstrated the impact they’re having on vulnerable populations.
Economists have suggested that the US will benefit from domestic energy production. They encourage the construction of miniature nuclear plants and data centers.
Big tech companies do have sustainability initiatives, but they focus primarily on carbon emission reduction. The depletion of freshwater resources has received less attention from the media, appears to be less tightly regulated, and may end up being the most important issue.
🚫 Google came under fire in November 2023, after it was revealed that their data center cooling units consumed one third of the Oregon Dalles natural water supply.
New data centers were quietly approved in the same area during 2024, following pledges from Google to improve on existing water and energy infrastructure.
🚫 In May 2024, Microsoft’s environmental sustainability report confirmed that they failed to replenish the water consumed by datacenter operations. Their AI services led to a 34% increase in water consumption against previous years.
🚫 OpenAI’s data centers in West Des Moines depleted local aquifers, triggering a drop in water pressure that impacted local residents.
ChatGPT consumed 16-ounces of water per 5-50 prompts in early 2023, according to Forbes. What does that number look like in late 2024?
🚫 Meta’s water consumption increased by 137% in 2023. They were pulling groundwater from Oregon, Iowa and Nebraska.
Freshwater restoration efforts led to a 10% recovery of the 55,500 megaliters consumed. The 50k megaliter loss would be enough to fill 20,000 standard Olympic-size swimming pools.
🚫 Amazon Web Services (AWS) appears to be a major offender, but their water use is mostly private. They’ve made a commitment to become “water positive” by 2030, a distant goal post considering the growing rate of consumption.
According to UNESCO, 50% of the people on our planet suffer from extreme water scarcity for at least one month every year. Do we want our generative audio products contributing to that problem, when there might be a better alternative?
How DataMind reduced the impact of their AI music app
Professor Ben Cantil, founder of DataMind Audio, is the perfect example of a founder who prioritized ethics during model training.
DataMind partners directly with artists to train fine-tuned models on their style. He offers a generous 50% revenue share and credits them directly on the company’s website.
Their brick and mortar headquarters are powered by solar energy. They formerly completed a government sponsored study that reduced the local GPU energy footprint by 40% over a two month period. Cantil has made a public commitment to use green GPU centers whenever they outsource model training.
His main product is a tone morphing plugin called The Combobulator. Watch a demo of the plugin below to see how it works:
Exploring AI MIDI software further
We’ve already covered some of the Fairly Trained AI MIDI generation companies. Outside that camp, you can also check out HookTheory’s state of the art AI MIDI generation feature Aria.
The AI MIDI startup Samplab has also released several free browser tools in 2024, though they specialize in audio to MIDI rather than generative music.
Delphos Music is a B2B AI MIDI modeling service that gives musicians the power to fine-tune MIDI models on their own audio stems. Their service is currently high touch and operated through a web browser, but they do have a DAW plugin in beta.
Staccato is building an AI MIDI browser app that can analyze and expand on MIDI content. I’ve also seen a private demo from the AI text-to-MIDI generation startup Muse that looked very promising.
Bookmark our AI MIDI generator article to follow along. We update the list a few times a year and keep it up to date.
This article was written by MIDI Association member Ezra Sandzer-Bell, founder at the text-to-MIDI plugin company AudioCipher Technologies.