Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. She is known for narrative songs about her personal life, which have received widespread media coverage. At age 14, Swift became the youngest artist signed by the Sony/ATV Music publishing house and, at 15, she signed her first record deal.
Her 2006 eponymous debut album was the longest-charting album of the 2000s in the US. Its third single, "Our Song", made her the youngest person to single-handedly write and perform a number-one song on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. Swift's second album, Fearless, was released in 2008.
Buoyed by the pop crossover success of the singles "Love Story" and "You Belong with Me", it became the US' best-selling album of 2009 and was certified diamond in the US. The album won four Grammy Awards, and Swift became the youngest Album of the Year winner.
Universal Music Posts Strong Quarter While Firing Off Fighting Words on AI
variety.comJem Aswad Senior Music Editor Driven by big releases from Morgan Wallen, Taylor Swift, Tomorrow X Together, Drake and others, Universal Music Group saw its revenues rise 11.5% year over year to $2.71 billion in the first quarter of 2023.
But the company’s earnings call on Wednesday was just as newsworthy for the company doubling down on the strong remarks it has made about the fast-rising presence of — some would say threat from — AI in the music world, which hit UMG in the form of “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song using AI-generated soundalikes of two of the company’s biggest artists, Drake and the Weeknd. “The recent explosive development in generative AI will, if left unchecked, both increase the flood of unwanted content hosted on platforms, and create rights issues with respect to existing copyright law, in the U.S.
and other countries, as well as laws governing trademark, name and likeness, voice impersonation, and right of publicity,” chairman-CEO Lucian Grainge said on the call. “Much of the latest generative AI is trained on copyrighted material, which clearly violates artists’ and labels’ rights, and would put [streaming] platforms completely at odds with the partnerships with us and our artists,” he continued. “Any way you look at it, this oversupply, whether or not AI-created is, simply, bad.
Bad for artists. Bad for fans. And bad for the platforms themselves.” Michael Nash, the company’s chief digital officer, added later, “We own all sounds captured on our sound recordings.
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