‘AI companies must properly license music if they’re going to use it for training!’ has been the collective cry from the music industry over the last year and a half. But of course, this requires those licensing deals to be available – not just from labels, but from publishers and collecting societies too.
On that note, there is some big news from Swedish collecting society STIM this week. It has launched what it says is “the world’s first collective AI license for music”.
It “covers a selection of works by creators who have explicitly given their consent and ensure fair compensation when their music is used in AI contexts”.
It’s a careful rollout. For now, the licence is launching as a pilot project with startups Songfox and Sureel, with STIM admitting that “only a limited number of works” are included in its first phase.
However, it does include attribution: so that money can be paid not just for the right to use the training material in the first place, but also to trace back the influences on the songs created by those models, in order to pay royalties to the original rightsholders.
This may be the first collective licence for AI music, but it’s not the first example of a collecting society engaging with this challenge.
In October 2023, French society Sacem announced that it was exercising its right to opt out of its members’ works being used to train AI models – in order to force AI firms to the negotiating table to strike licensing deals.
In September 2024, meanwhile, German society GEMA presented some of its ideas for how an AI licence should work, stressing the importance of attribution.
“Pure remuneration through a buyout, i.e. a one-off lump sum payment for training data, is not nearly sufficient to compensate authors in view of the revenues that can be generated,” said GEMA then. STIM’s license follows that logic too.
It’s a positive step to have a licence available, but that’s just one step. The task for STIM now – and fellow societies around the world who launch their own versions, which they will – is to persuade AI companies to actually sign it.
