Sony appoints an executive vice president for artificial intelligence

Sony Music Entertainment appoints Geoff Taylor as Vice President to coordinate all AI-related activities at the company

Artificial intelligence is becoming more widespread in a variety of industries, including the entertainment industry. It looks like Sony is ready to embrace this technology, as the company’s music division recently hired a vice president of artificial intelligence. Geoff Taylor, former CEO of the British Phonographic Industry trade body, will take over the role and report directly to Kevin Kelleher, COO of Sony Music Entertainment and Chief Operating Officer. Variety reports the new appointment, which will reportedly include coordinating all AI-related activities within the company, as well as coordinating with the global digital business and legal affairs divisions. Prior to taking on his role as Sony Music’s executive vice president for AI, Taylor primarily battled piracy and fraud during his tenure at BPI. By appointing an executive to a role specifically for AI, it looks like Sony Music is definitely making sure AI is a viable part of your business in the future in an effort to get ahead of the times.

Artificial intelligence and music: the phenomenon of fan-made songs

Artificial intelligence has already made its way into the music industry: fans are using text-to-speech platforms to remake songs with vocals from their favorite artists. Some prime examples are Kanye West songs reworked by Drake and vice versa. Fans have also used these platforms to create brand new songs using the voices of these artists. Obviously, fan-made products cannot be sold for a fee, and there has already been much discussion about the legality of this type of content. Clearly, Sony believes this problem will become more prevalent as AI becomes increasingly accessible to average consumers. The most notable example is musician Grimes, who encouraged her fans to use their voices to create songs, and who split the royalties of those songs 50/50 for each song that was successful. The open-source platform provided by Grimes, elf.tech, is trained to mimic his voice and has resulted in the already viral song “Cold Touch” by musician Kito, which Grimes calls his “masterpiece”. Grimes has the rare status of not being signed to a label; So, the red tape required to get something like this flagged off is a lot less complicated.