While major record companies have been trying to fend off songs with AI soundtracks from popular artists, Grimes has other ideas.
Grimes: “I will split 50% of the royalties on any AI-generated hit song that uses my voice” Posted on Twitter Sunday night. “Feel free to use my voice without penalty,” she said, claiming that she bears no label and “does not have any legal restrictions.”
At this point, Grimes’ Sunday night tweet appears to be just a late-night tweet that just, maybe, could become something in the future. Grimes didn’t add many details about how such arrangements would work however He said Revenue sharing could apply to “viral” or “superpopular” tracks made using her already moving voice.
Grimes isn’t the first artist to embrace sound reproduction and AI tools. Experimental musician Holly Herndon introduced her own prosthetic voice called Holly Plus in 2021. Herndon allows users to upload audio files and receive a new version sung in her voice. Only members of the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) Herndon are able to benefit from the voice model.
Vocal models trained on a collection of artist recordings are now more accessible than ever, producing results that are weird, hilarious, and a little scary. A song created using vocal samples from Drake and The Weeknd went viral last week, only to be uniformly yanked from streaming platforms shortly after. In the midst of the “Heart on My Sleeve” going viral, Universal Music Group released a strongly worded statement alleging that training AI models in their artists’ work is copyright infringement.