My Sleeve: Last News

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. has posted an Instagram video walking back comments published in the New York Times yesterday expressing support for the Grammy eligibility of "Heart on My Sleeve," a song created using deepfaked voice models of Drake and the Weeknd. Criticizing what he characterized as "bad and really inaccurate information," Mason Jr.

Ethan Shanfeld It’s been a month since Drake’s latest Kendrick Lamar diss, “The Heart Part 6,” but is his next musical move really a cover of “Hey There Delilah”? Late on Monday, the internet exploded with a version of the Plain White T’s moody 2005 hit sung in Caribbean patois in what sounds like Drake‘s voice (but these days, who knows?). The cover, titled “Wah Gwan Delilah” and filled with Toronto references and slang, was uploaded by SoundCloud user Snowd4y and claims to feature Drake.

“Heart on My Sleeve,” a song created by the producer Ghostwriter using deepfaked vocal likenesses of Drake and The Weeknd, has been submitted to the Grammys for consideration, the New York Times reports. The song debuted in April and was created without the approval of either artist; after the song quickly became a viral sensation, Universal Music Group successfully pulled it from streaming services.

Ethan Shanfeld A collaborative track featuring AI-generated facsimiles of Drake and the Weeknd’s voices titled “Heart on My Sleeve” has been submitted for Grammy consideration. One caveat: Neither Drake nor the Weeknd had anything to do with it.

Thania Garcia Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music rights company, has requested aid from the United States Congress to combat copyright infringement by people using and developing new AI technology. Jeffery Harleston, UMG’s general counsel/executive vice president of business and legal affairs, spoke as a witness in a Senate Judiciary Committee on July 12 and called for a federal “right of publicity” — the intellectual property right that shields a person’s likenesses such as their voice and name (some states already follow this guideline but Harleston is arguing for a nationwide statute). According to a report by Music Business Worldwide, the company also requested copyright owners should have awareness of AI training models and that all “AI-generated content” should be labeled as such.

reads the guidelines for the 66th annual Grammy Awards, set for Feb. 4, 2024.

David Guetta channeled Eminem on a song through artificial intelligence. The volume hit 11 in April, when “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song with AI-generated vocals by a fake Drake and a fake Weeknd, racked up millions of streams before being removed by streaming services, and louder still when electronic artist Grimes not only promised a 50-50 split with anyone who wants to use her AI voice on a song, she launched software called Elf.Tech to help them do it. Artificial intelligence by way of machine learning is the latest existential threat to the music business, and unlike the frequently cited precedent of Napster-era piracy, which opened the door to illegal downloads, the industry has mobilized quickly to respond, with takedown orders, petitions, op-eds and the Human Artistry Campaign, an initiative established to set fair practices in AI, not just in music but in other arts and even sports; Human Artistry’s dozens of members range from the Recording Academy to the Graphic Artists Guild.

Rachel Narozniak From April 26 to 28, some 1,300 delegates across sectors of the dance music industry descended on the Destino Pacha Ibiza resort to, in the theme of the 14th annual IMS Ibiza summit, face the industry’s future in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The consensus? “Pandora’s box is definitely open,” Daouda Leonard, CEO and co-founder of Create Safe, proclaimed during a debate touted by conference programming as “possibly the most important IMS discussion of the 2023 event” (“Understanding the Unstoppable: AI & Music Unravelled, The Potential, The Threats, The Future”). To put it in Web3 terms, although generative AI may be in its “1.0 stage” in the music ecosystem at present, its implications for asset production, differentiation, rights, ownership, and artist-fan engagement, warrant discussion. At IMS, “Heart on My Sleeve,” a deep-fake “collaboration” crafted using AI that simulated the voices of two of music’s biggest stars, Drake and The Weeknd, served as a timely case study of AI as it relates to music creation and intellectual property (IP). The song, realistic enough in sound to support its arc from AI experiment to viral sensation, racked up more than 11 million views on TikTok before it was pulled from digital streaming platforms (DSPs) and social channels on April 17 following Universal Music Group’s invocation of copyright violation.

Jem 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. 

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Are you ready for deep-fake-Drake? Many fans are, at least as an amusing lark, as an apparently artificial-intelligence-generated “collaboration” between “Drake” and “the Weeknd” began to go viral over the weekend, for how closely the styles of the two superstars are mimicked in a track titled “Heart on My Sleeve.” It’s no joke, though, to artists and labels wondering whether such soundalike tracks can quickly be quashed, and whether gullible fans may have a hard time telling the difference if the trend accelerates. The mystery account behind the AI song, identifying as Ghostwriter, left no clues about how the imitative track was brought into being, or what information was fed into programs to create it. But in two minutes and 16 seconds, “Heart on My Sleeve” consists of two distinct verses and a chorus sung by voices distinctly resembling the two stars, with lyrics referring to Selena Gomez, who was reported to have been dating the Weeknd in the mid-2010s. Sample lyrics: “I came in with my ex like Selena to flex, aye / Bumpin’ Justin Bieber the fever ain’t left, aye”… And, “Talkin’ to a diva yeah she on my nerves / She think that I need her, kick her to the curb ‘ All I know is you could’ve had the world … yeah, you were my world.”