If alarm bells were already ringing in the music business, they grew deafening when the AI-generated track “Heart on My Sleeve” made headlines in April of 2023. The now-infamous song harnessed AI voice-cloning technology to create a startlingly lifelike — but ultimately “deepfake” — collaborative performance between artists Drake and The Weeknd.
When the song hit streaming services, it garnered more than half a million streams before Universal Music Group (”UMG”) raced to have it taken down. In a somewhat dramatic statement, UMG asked the stark question: “which side of history [do] stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans, and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud, and denying artists their due compensation?”