US music label Universal is asking streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to block access to companies using artificial intelligence (AI) who want to steal its music.

The news reported by Variety magazine is confirmed in a report by the Financial Times. A Universal Music Group spokesperson said the label has a “moral duty” and “commercial responsibility” to its artists to “prevent unauthorized use” of their music, but also “to prevent streaming platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators”.

For AI companies, the process involves downloading music directly from streaming services to their platforms so that their bots can memorize the targeted artist’s lyrics and music. Thanks to fairly sophisticated algorithms, they can then generate pieces and melodies of the same style. And even reproduce the voice of the targeted artist with new lyrics.

Variety gives the example of French DJ David Guetta, who added an AI-generated segment rapped by Eminem to one of his songs last February. Guetta first asked chatbot ChatGPT to write him some “Eminem-style” lyrics about “future rave.”

Using AI software that has archives of Eminem’s voice (taken from listening services), he was able to get him to sing this segment. David Guetta never commercialized the piece and presented it as such: a song that contains an AI segment, but it sounded the alarm in the musical world.

However, the problems are only beginning for the music industry… Google is working on the MusicLM project, which can generate music from any written description. The multinational owns 280,000 hours of music, according to the Financial Times. It is not known if the rights to these musics have been acquired or if they are illegally appropriated musics.