It really is the great rock n’ roll swindle. Billboard has published evidence collated by the international music publishing trade association, the ICMP that some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter/X and Open AI, have illegally scraped copy-protected music from millions of artists and songwriters to train their AI models.
Artists affected include The Beatles, Mariah Carey, The Weeknd, Beyonce and Bob Dylan – and those are only the megastars. The ICMP has compiled a dossier from open-source repositories of training content, leaked material, research papers and independent research. It says this shows “comprehensive and clear” evidence of the unlicensed use of digital music on a “global and highly extensive scale.”
