The Eurythmics co-founder Dave Stewart has said artificial intelligence is an “unstoppable force”, and musicians and other artists should bow to the inevitable and license their music to generative AI platforms.
These platforms use artificial intelligence to analyse existing songs and tracks, using that knowledge to generate completely new ones as prompted by a user. For example, someone could ask the AI platform to generate a song about a boozy night out in the style of a Britpop band, and it would draw on songs with similar sounds and themes to create its own.
In recent weeks, Universal and Warner have partnered with the AI platforms Udio and Suno respectively, so that anyone can make their own music based on the work of the artists signed to those labels, or manipulate and remix existing songs.
“Everybody should be selling or licensing their voice and their skills to these companies,” Stewart said. “Otherwise they’re just going to take it anyway.”
That is countered by the companies and big labels, which have said their artists would have to opt into the services and would then receive royalties from the use of the work by AI companies.
Stewart, who had nine UK Top 10 albums and as many singles with Eurythmics, forecast major upheavals in the music industry from AI and other forces, even after the ructions of piracy and streaming in recent years. “There’s going to be a disintegration of giant corporations controlling their artists,” he said.
He was speaking as he unveiled Rare Entity, a new venture hoping to be part of that disintegration.
Stewart said artists tended to be “right at the bottom” in a corporate structure, and made to feel thankful for a deal that was “usually terrible”. Rare Entity aimed to give creatives across multiple disciplines total control and ownership of their work, rather than them giving up their rights to record labels or other companies. And in the fast-moving world of digital technology, the speed at which AI has taken hold is a clear warning to artists about the importance of owning their work and therefore being in control of how – and whether – it was used by AI platforms and others.
Set up with the entrepreneurs Dom Joseph and Rich Britton, Rare Entity offers to financially support projects being developed, as well as ideas that may need creative and commercial help. Rare Entity does not seek to own the underlying intellectual property but instead to take a share in the earnings generated by the funded venture. Examples of projects up and running include Planet Fans, a platform for artists and their teams to communicate with fans about ticketing, merchandise and more.
Stewart said the idea was initially inspired in the early 1980s by him and Annie Lennox having to get a £5,000 bank loan to get Eurythmics going. It began properly percolating in 2002 when he organised a gathering in the boardroom of Deutsche Bank in New York.
“I invited various people,” Stewart said. “Lou Reed, Stevie Wonder, Dr Dre, Dr Dre’s lawyer. I was explaining, with the advent of the internet that artists better start thinking in a different way, create their own world and take control back of whatever they could take control back of.”
As someone fighting for creative autonomy as well as an evangelist for the transformative power of technology, Stewart says he is not as anxious as other musicians about generative AI. In the right hands, just like his first drum machine, it should be wielded as a creative tool – but never as a total replacement for creativity.
He says people in creative sectors should all study Gilbert and George’s Ten Commandments for artists. “My favourite one is, ‘Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shalt do it’.”
