KLAY is a new AI streaming network for major labels

seems bad!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-20/major-music-labels-strike-deals-with-new-ai-streaming-service

“Klay is building a product that will offer the features of a streaming service like Spotify, amplified by AI technology that will let users remake songs in different styles.

Klay has licensed the rights to thousands of hit songs so that it can train its large language model”

did any of the artists get a say in this

https://img.sfist.com/2025/10/replacement-ai-billboard-2.jpg

boo

this falls in line w/ the industry's post-napster strategy of approaching new technology from the POV of "how do we begin to monetize this as quickly as possible" rather than fighting it

there is a viral song right now that is the subject of a legal battle over whether jorja smith's music was involved in the formulation of an AI created vocal sample. in this case the producers may not have done that but at this point it's pretty easy to imagine a viral song that utilized AI based on specific songs/artists and i think from there you can understand why the labels take the position of "we aren't going to be able to stop this from happening so we may as well come to licensing agreements that allow us and the artists to get paid off of what is inevitably going to happen." the issue to me is less the wisdom of that position and of course instead how the pie is being split between the labels and artists and because labels own the licenses the artists don't have any say in how that split is handled (this is why musicians need unions)

https://www.billboard.com/pro/haven-i-run-poised-hit-ai-deepfake-allegations-slowed/

the other option is to basically embark on a yearslong legal battle to sue these companies out of existence. the majors are suing suno right now so there is some appetite to legally fight certain companies if need be. i don't think there is an appetite to try and legally exterminate the entire industry that is AI generated music (which again is a lesson they learned from napster)

labels could also benefit from AI-generated music in much clearer ways than file-sharing/streaming

Notable:

https://www.wmg.com/news/growing-the-value-of-music-for-artists-and-songwriters

Future of Music Coalition in response on Bluesky:

Warner is saying that any AI deals they'll agree to as a company will be opt-in only. That's consistent with the principles we all agreed to via Human Artistry Campaign. Even if you think gen AI music sucks, that's an important guardrail.

the music industry is structured the way every other industry in America is structured, around funneling money away from people who do the work to people who take credit for the work. 100% makes sense that they would "embrace AI" just like every other industry in America

labels could also benefit from AI-generated music in much clearer ways than file-sharing/streaming

― rob, Thursday, November 20, 2025 4:33 PM (eleven minutes ago)

i don't really think that's true. imagine if the labels had approached napster from a place of collaboration before itunes was even invented, there would have been so much more money to be made at that point in time off of a new method of distributing all the music in the world than what is going to be generated right now off of AI music, which is like, okay you might have a big viral hit that generates some millions of dollars in profit. that is small change compared to what the labels could have done in 1999 w/ napster if they understood the technology and where the future was headed as opposed to thinking they could sue file sharing out of existence and we'd all go back to buying $20 CDs. labels striking deals w/ AI companies at its core comes from a place of realizing that technology that can fundamentally alter the music industry is going to develop outside the music industry and outside of the music industry's control and there is no way to fight that, so the more prudent strategy is to immediately start making the technology work for you. they also applied this logic to the concept of cloud computing and btw if you use spotify you are prob contributing to the rot of the music industry more so than AI companies

yeah I don't think this is all that similar to Napster, I don't think too many people actually want AI-generated music and would be fine never having to hear it in their lives. a lot of artists have tried experiments in interactivity and it just doesn't seem like there are a whole lot of folks out there clamoring for that. whereas with Napster, it was pretty clear digital downloads were gonna be the new way of primarily listening to music one way or the other

xp
ok yeah I agree with that. I do think automating labor (especially right now) is a no-brainer move right now whereas collaborating with pirate nerds wasn't quite so much in the context of the 90s? That said, the music industry failing to capitalize on a new method of product distribution was sort of out of character now that I think about it more

I think there are some Muzak-like use cases for AI music, but yes you guys are right that owning Spotify would be vastly more lucrative

i was going to say, i think there's always been a need for functional music, whether it's the Muzak of the '60s and '70s, or commercial jingles of various kinds, or the chill beats and podcast intros of our current era. from a commercial standpoint, i can see the appeal of a deep bank of royalty-free cues and moods

yeah I don't think this is all that similar to Napster

anything the music industry does regarding new technology absolutely has to do with napster. this is all about the monetization of copyrighted works. napster illegally monetized copyrighted works; making deals w/ AI companies is about legally monetizing copyrighted works. the entire music industry is based on owning and "exploiting" copyrights and these deals are meant to protect that method of making money, which napster was able to temporarily decimate

I don't think too many people actually want AI-generated music and would be fine never having to hear it in their lives. a lot of artists have tried experiments in interactivity and it just doesn't seem like there are a whole lot of folks out there clamoring for that.

i think you're looking at it the wrong way. you're thinking about fully AI generated artists and music and yes whether there is an audience for that is debatable. but i would encourage you to read the billboard article i linked to a few posts ago, which is about whether AI was used to create a vocal sample that sounds like jorja smith and was marketed as being jorja smith but now the producers are saying that they didn't actually literally type jorja smith's name into the AI prompt to create the vocal sample. there is no counter movement on tiktok to the virality of that song from people saying "we can't stand by as an AI vocal samples in used in this tik tok viral house song." it's well known that producers are using AI to "generate ideas" or make parts of songs/beats that are used in conjunction w/ human made music. there is an entire infrastructure of producers in the rap and pop world who simply make instrumental loops or vocal samples for other producers to build full beats out of, "work" like that is being shifted over to AI as you can see in this story being covered by billboard. i don't think that there is going to be a huge groundswell of people who say that they don't want to listen to pop or dance music w/ vocal samples or keyboard parts created by or w/ the help of AI, especially if they've already heard the song on tiktok and have grown to like it.

your argument is basically "eh this is gonna die out" and i think that is not really the correct approach to the convergence of music production and AI

yea this might kill off the careers of 'library musicians', who specialize in composing and recording stuff very similar to popular acts but changed enough so they can't get sued. amusingly from a legal perspective I think if you can actually prove the algorithm is using your work you may have a claim there. maybe that's what they're trying to get ahead of.

i'm sure AI generated music is gonna be in our lives one way or another, i just don't see it as something regular people would pay for. AI tools for producing on the other hand, that's probably something

the music industry is structured the way every other industry in America is structured, around funneling money away from people who do the work to people who take credit for the work. 100% makes sense that they would "embrace AI" just like every other industry in America

― budo jeru, Thursday, November 20, 2025 4:53 PM (thirty-seven seconds ago)

well yes but companies that own the art being used by AI have a much different set of concerns -- including on behalf of the artists -- when deciding whether to "embrace AI" than do companies that are simply using AI to automate work. it's really not the same thing

amusingly from a legal perspective I think if you can actually prove the algorithm is using your work you may have a claim there. maybe that's what they're trying to get ahead of.

i'm just gonna point out to you that you are writing 1+1=2 on the chalkboard yourself and then standing back and saying "wait maybe it's actually 1+1=3"

also i been in these la sessions them boys using copious amounts of ai

— marcus of nourished by time (@nourishedbytime) November 13, 2025

well, i was going to say that i think we're already at a point where SO much music is AI-assisted, in ways that listeners don't immediately clock as non-human. i think maybe what some people object to is the fabrication of artists whole cloth (but even this isn't so different from something like the Archies), but as with so many things nowadays, it's about perception and our emotional reaction to this rather than any kind of objective distinction. and so i think a lot of criticisms about the present moment end up swirling around this vague idea of "paying artists" or something and it can feel a little reactionary. that's why i think it's important to keep in mind what the music industry is, structurally, and why i said what i said about the economics of it. not because i think Albert Grossman on the one hand and Dr. Luke using freebeat.ai or whatever on the other is 100% the same thing

sorry i feel like i cannot type or think fast enough to keep up with this convo in real time

Yeah I get what you're saying Jordan. I don't doubt this is already happening more than anyone realizes. I'm already noticing a lot of stuff in commercials that I suspect is AI generated. I guess I have no clue how the legal side of this works. I remember a thing with AI image generators where people would make pictures of Spongebob Squarepants doing 9/11 or whatever which led to them banning certain inputs, so if you wrote "Spongebob" it would say it can't do that but you could still prompt it with "yellow rectangular cartoon character" and most of the time it would give you Spongebob anyway, not really sure what you're supposed to do about that once it's already in the training data

i'm just gonna point out to you that you are writing 1+1=2 on the chalkboard yourself and then standing back and saying "wait maybe it's actually 1+1=3"

― slob wizard (J0rdan S.), Thursday, November 20, 2025 4:22 PM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

idk I think it's a lot easier to discover what prompts were used and who's works are in the training data than it is to figure out what's going on in someone's head