With consent and compensation in mind, LANDR, an AI-focused music production, distribution, and education platform, has come up with a new way for musicians to take advantage of the advent of the AI era. With their new Fair Trade AI program, any musician who wants to participate can join this growing pool of songs that will be used to train LANDR’s various AI models, tools, and systems. Called “the music industry’s first mature opt-in attribution model,” the team at LANDR believes this model is a viable way to provide artists with a new recurring revenue stream while simultaneously helping develop the next generation of AI music technology.
LANDR has been in the AI music space since releasing its early AI mastering solution in 2013. Today, the company has grown to offer a much larger suite of tools, offering everything from distribution services, educational courses, plugins, mastering, and more. Participating artists receive 20% of the revenue generated by LANDR’s tools (AI plugins, mobile apps, cloud services, etc.) that utilize this dataset for training. Musicians can also add new music to the dataset over time, which will grow their 20% share of revenue they receive from being part of the dataset.
LANDR plans to license its AI tools to third parties, but has no plans to sell or license the dataset to other AI music companies. “It’s the best of both worlds,” LANDR said. Daniel Roland“Our users benefit from their data remaining with us, rather than directly in the hands of a number of companies,” said , head of strategy and partnerships at LANDR.
Any musician can submit their music, but LANDR reserves the right to curate the tracks that are added to the dataset, and all submitted tracks must be created by musicians with full publishing rights. Musicians who use LANDR’s distribution service can opt-in to the Fairtrade AI program very quickly, by simply checking a box when going through the steps to release their music. Users can also opt-out of the program at any time, but their work will remain part of the dataset until the next training cycle, which occurs every 2-3 months.
Pascal PilonLANDR founder David Haas had this to say about the new program: “LANDR’s mission is to empower musicians to create, get heard, and monetize their work. Over the past year, we’ve seen the emergence of new generative AI tools and the legal challenges facing the industry, and now we see an opportunity to leverage our influence to create a healthy and exciting market for DIY musicians around the world, while developing empowering tools that enhance their creativity and workflow, not replace it.”
