It's an insanely sticky wicket SoundCloud is getting themselves into if this is for real. Just one example off the top of my head... Let's say you upload your work to SoundCloud, and the work includes samples in your music that you purchased and therefore have the legal right to use, but with certain standard limitations. Your work gets scraped by SC, and the next thing, an AI creation is streaming and the company that created the original samples is able to identify the use of those samples in the AI creation. The number of legal questions that creates is total insanity.

Did the original SoundCloud uploader have the right to get into his scraping permission with SoundCloud which now has those samples re-processed for an AI creation? The original uploader had the right to use the samples, but Soundcloud doesn't necessarily 'inherit' that right, and the original uploader has no legal right to just give away that intellectual property. Did the person responsible for the AI creation have the right to create work from samples they weren't the legal user of? Which party is responsible (and owes money) to the original producer of the samples, the original SC uploader, the AI scraper, the company streaming the AI production, all of them?

Give me a few hours and I could come up with a dozen examples of the sort of nutso problems this will create. Lawyers will have a field day over SoundCloud's new adventure, everyone else will likely have years of legal misery. I'd avoid this crap like the plague. It's offensive, and SoundCloud can go screw themselves.

 

seems this is being misinterpreted online
https://pitchfork.com/news/soundcloud-addresses-terms-of-use-allowing-ai-training-on-uploaded-music/

 

That's it. Anything that's publicly available will be used by someone sooner or later, in some way.

 

Not surprised. They get scaped every day by bot anyway, so they may as well get paid for it. Users need to get their own platforms. It is relatively cheap these days to get your own site to host your music. SoundCloud makes it easier to post other places, but there are many options where you control the data on your own home server or VPS. Its the better move going forward.

 

^This is the proper response. Roll your own or stop bitching.

Big data is prepping everyone to get used to privacy invasion like that shit is a normal way to treat people.

It's not.

 

Nothing Soundcloud do are really going to help the issue in either direction. Lucida.to seems down and doubledouble is not a replacement for it; but on Lucida you could enter the url of any track on Soundcloud, downloads disabled and "no.ai" tags or not, and it would download the song and convert it to any audio file format you wanted.

Soundcloud's own thoughts on the matter are not going to prevent anything. Just like Amazon, Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, Spotify, and any other service that allows streaming will not either. AI is not dependent on audio quality in the traditional sense, and will streamrip anything it is aimed at.

 

These AI tools are needing less and less data to make a good model. Initially these algos needed a lot of compute and data. From what we learned from deepseek releasing R1 that through reinforcement learning we dont need as much data to make a good model on training and infer sides.

The music gen models are also getting more diverse in their generations with every fine tune and update just like we see in LLM, Image Gen. etc.

Dont worry the 1/1000000000000000000...........th a model might even reference a song you created will mater or even show up when infered via model. Another way to think of it is if someone sampled a single hi hat from your song cut it short pitched it and rearranged the pattern and put that in their song.
Would it be enough to pinpoint your work?
Why even use your work when they already understand what a hi hat does from other data?

Its legal vs data scientist race right now. As well as the public adapting and accepting to using these tools.

 

" I don't know about the other 300 million songs on Soundcloud, but it would learn a lot from MY tracks."

 

Not about SoundCloud, so a bit off topic, but I have just received another Terms Update, now from Yahoo Mail. They practically asked me if they could use and abuse my emails in various ways, but they offer some new "smart features" for this "little trouble". Thankfully it is opt-in and they offered me to accept or reject these "smart features" they offered. Oh the language they use, gives me diarrhoea. There's nothing smart about those stupid features. Just leave everything as it is, Yahoo. I'm too stupid to use your "smart features".

This probably rounds up all the change of terms of use I've received this year from all the web services I use. Which is not too many, but they all changed the terms of use and I always made sure to at least partially read them. This year is cooked. The data collection and training AI is making companies go nuts.

 

If my music's any good, it's because of what i listened to as a youth, it's called influence.

AI is merely gaining its 'influence.'

Have any of you got any music that is worth ripping off, because if you have, I, or anybody else could just assimilate it, and in a similar way that AI does, less surruptitiously though perhaps.

And there used to be, still is? legit rip-off Albums, soundalikes, copies of major acts hit songs for sale.

How would AI recreate say, an authentic sounding Beatles track, when even Paul Mcartney couldn't, otherwise he would.

AI must already have more than enough of the appropriate info to compose music, so if AI could really cut it, it would already be dominating the charts.

AI excels at number crunching, that's about it, the numericals involved in musical composition don't need crunching, they just need gentle nudgeing into place.

 

Last edited: May 12, 2025 at 8:19 AM

While i agree with you on the first part, the second part is less true. Another year or two these ai's will be able to create and replicate anything.

 

and it does, top Spotify playlists are all AI songs

 

It must be said, however, that we unfortunately haven't managed to create something like Amazon, Spitify, YouTube, or SoundCloud, etc., ourselves. Our lack of organization is coming back to haunt us.

 

Anything online marked as "FREE" - It regularly has some catch, whether to tolerate piles of advertising, or you agree to something you possibly may not normally, or install something that you probably shouldn't, or let them stream/use your stuff for no return, or have to include/credit them in whatever you do from it - whatever... It is rare to find anything anywhere that there is nothing asked for in return. So it isn't really free other than no money changing hands, it's free with conditions.

The words FREE and GIFT are two different things. A gift given asks for nothing in return.
Theoretically, every streaming site is a glorified agent. They should be only taking a percentage and paying you for selling your work, with the artist getting the majority. Until the last 15-20 years, they were. It's unlikely it will return to that in the near future, if ever.

 

Last edited: May 12, 2025 at 12:59 PM

A TOS or EULA now = RTFM.
If it says they can copy or have A.I. do whatever it likes with what you put put up and you didn't read their terms...well...

 

and this applies 10-fold to any "free" online AI services - usually you're being harvested for all the data you input/upload/type and interaction telemetry

 

Traffic costs money, and server rental also has to be paid for, usually through advertising or through an uncle named Bill Gates. You often pay with your data. You can get upset, but how about we get together? Everyone contributes €10 per year, and we use that to pay for the server.

 

I work with a lot of these AI companies. And Believe me there are a lot of songs that have came out over the past year that have elements of AI all in them. Stems, Vocals, Samples, even as a tool to reimagine melodies or finish up demos.

Just because everyone is in the closet about their use of AI publicly its being used in most studio sessions these days.

 

They stay afloat by the value of our data. They can use it for adds etc. It costs companies millions and billions to give us these services for "free"

If you look at it from their perspective it actually makes sense. Or else we would be paying premiums for every service we use for "Free" online.