You didn’t used to have to be an expert on intellectual property law just to be a music fan. You would just put on your headphones, hit play, and enjoy whatever your favorite artist had made for you to listen to. Maybe you would listen to a record, or if you were old enough, a CD, or if you were old enough, a record.
But thanks to the bottomless greed that suits in the music industry have had her the years, fans have had to learn about formerly-obscure concepts like recording contracts and licensing rights and master recordings. And no one in recent years has done more to teach them about these details than Taylor Swift, whose years-long campaign to wrest back control of her master recordings culminated with the triumphant announcement, earlier this year, of her having purchased her entire catalog of master recordings. This announcement meant fans were no longer forced to choose between the versions of her albums they originally heard, or the re-recordings of those classics that she’s been releasing to streaming services with expanded tracks and guest features and all-new art, all meant to displace the legacy versions with ones under her control.
The capstone on Taylor’s reclamation of her work was the recent New Heights podcast her with her now-fiancé Travis Kelce, where her narration of the battle to own her work, talking about the loss she felt over work she’s been creating since she was a teenager, was moving even to those who weren’t fans of her music or who didn’t know her songs very well. It humanized these kinds of battles as being about art and heart, not just abstract legal concerns.
A Master Plan
All of this seemed very familiar to me as a Prince fan, as it mirrored the pioneering battle he’d fought starting in the early 1990s, based on his having signed a contract when he was a teenager As he explained in a letter to fans, “both youth and excitement towards the opportunity to have an album produced made me, as Prince, naïve”. Based on the long history of Black artists having been exploited and abused by the music industry, Prince knew that it would be an arduous battle, but after nearly two decades of persevering, he won back full control of his master recordings for his entire catalog of dozens of albums before the end of his life. It was a triumph and a fitting victory for a man who wanted to be remembered for the phrase “If u don’t own your masters, then your masters own u.” It was a rallying cry that galvanized fans.
But that was a battle from the 20th century. I wasn’t sure if a generation of music fans growing up in the current era would have the same passion about these issues that we did, until I saw Swifties everywhere rallying behind her fight over these last few years. It’s been exciting to watch, especially in light of what’s been happening on the internet, and in technology at the same time. Great artists inspire the entire culture to change. And it was obvious that Taylor’s fans are ready to fight, and they have her back.
Gathering Intelligence
The single biggest conversation in every creative community right now is the enormous impact that the recent rise of artificial intelligence is having on creators. Virtually all of the biggest AI companies are training their models on massive amounts of creative work gathered almost entirely without consent, and very often without any respect for licensing or permissions. Worse, the models that are trained on those works are then very often used to create poor facsimiles of the works that were ingested into these systems, attempting to displace the very art that made them possible.
Now, I’m of the belief that AI systems don’t actually have to work this way, but the reality is that, at least right now, they almost all do. The big tools from the big companies have all been created this way, and the people running these companies largely treat the use of content without consent or compensation as an inevitability.
It’s worth noting, this is true despite the fact that many of the coders and programmers who create today’s technologies don’t necessarily agree with this ethical stance. Many developers and coders see themselves as much more aligned with other creators like writers and artists than they are with the management of tech companies. Coders recognize that their work has been used to train AI tools without consent or compensation as well — and that their management is just as eager to displace them with AI tools, too. So even within the “tech” world, there isn’t a unified consensus that this approach to intellectual property and the work of creators is the right one.
Even if people don’t have the right technical words for it, there’s a broad sense that things aren’t quite fair.
Bad Blood
Where that leaves us is with an enormous and passionate fan base of millions of people who know that an artist they care deeply about has fought for years for control of her work. They undoubtedly believe that she should have the right to say who has access to that work, and how they can profit from it. And nobody is more notorious than extremely-online fan bases when it comes to figuring out clues about how someone might be transgressing against their favorite artists.
It is almost a certainty that one of the big AI models has already trained its system on Taylor Swift’s music without her consent. It is nearly inevitable that their tools might start generating content based on having learned from her work, whether that is music or videos or lyrics or any other kind of media. And these companies are already charging money for that output, profiting from the things they derive from this work.
Once it becomes obvious to the global community of Swifties that a big AI company has taken Taylor’s Version without permission — has done to Taylor again what those creepy old record execs did to her as a young artist — how do they think that is going to go?
Don’t Blame Me
A lot of people are working on technical solutions to figure out what to do about all of the good and interesting and creative parts of the internet being sucked up into AI tools without any regard for what happens to the creators when that happens. Some are working on making sure people get paid when that happens. Some are just trying to block it all and stop it from happening. Some are working on even more complicated solutions. And I expect that we’ll see a combination of all of these approaches in the years to come.
But that’s looking at the problem as a technical issue. It’s much more of a social and cultural issue. And in that context, I would never count out the massive cultural force that is fan culture. The sheer cultural power that can be wielded by Swifties, or k-pop fans, or the Beyhive, or any other activated fanbase deciding that they really, really care about tech companies showing some damn respect to the artists that they love is going to turn out to be far more powerful than any technological approach to solving these issues.
This is especially key because most of the people creating the AI platforms, or the super-technical solutions to moving content around the internet, are nearly illiterate in the contemporary aspects of fan culture. They’re boomers (either literally or figuratively) who seldom consume today’s most relevant music or streams or tiktoks, they are unfamiliar with most influencers or cultural figures. They’re too often incurious about why people even love these artists and creators to begin with.
So as we try to figure out how to protect artists and creators, how to keep the open internet vital and flourishing, and how to preserve the culture and inspires and engages so many, the answer might be right in front of us. The biggest underestimated factor is the power of fan culture and the passion of people standing behind the artists and creators who they love, and the technologists and platforms that embrace that sentiment, and work with those fan communities, and tap into that feeling instead of fighting against it, are the ones that are destined to succeed in the long term.
