🍪 The AI music battle heats up

What’s up, my party people. This is Bite Sized Beta - we’re like the McDonald’s Kids Meal of tech news. We serve up a tasty meal, PLUS a toy.

Gotta sprinkle that fun in somewhere.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

In the oven this week:

  • 🤖 Grimes makes waves in the AI music battle

  • 🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite-sized headlines

  • 📈 Chart of the week: the shortness of life

  • 🗳️ Poll of the week: how are the people doin’? 

  • 🍫 Chocolate chips: our 3 favorite finds on the internet

  • 😂 Snickerdoodles: memes for the weekend

FRESHLY BAKED

THE AI MUSIC BATTLE HEATS UP

If you’ve been on social media at all, you’ll know that AI music has been straight poppin’ off. 

Why? 

Everyone’s using AI to create songs with popular artists’ voices. Think Kanye singing a Taylor Swift song. 

Here’s a popular track from “The Weekend” and “Drake,” and we gotta say, it’s pretty impressive. Dare I say more impressive than some of the actual songs they’ve released?? 🫢 Ok ok, a debate for another time.

Obviously, some people are not happy about this. 

Universal Music Group says AI music violates copyright laws, and has been trying to get the tracks banned from all streaming platforms. 

Meanwhile, Drake is also unimpressed:

But which artist has emerged through the kerfuffle with a new strategy? 

Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend: Grimes.

She just announced that anyone can use her voice in AI generated songs, as long as she gets 50% royalties. 

It makes a lot of financial sense. If ya can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. 

But there’s one big problem:

When you collab with another artist, you know exactly what kinda song you're making. If you don’t require explicit consent to use your voice, what’s gonna happen when someone uses your voice to make a song about how great Hitler was? 

Our prediction?

AI music will eventually be governed like remixes. Today, you can't publish your Rihanna remix to Spotify unless you have permission from the copyright holder, aka camp RiRi. 

With AI music, the equivalent copyright would be the artist’s “right” to their own voice.

It’s gonna be a legal doozy, but in the meantime, we’ll be on TikTok enjoying Kanye’s rendition of “Shake it Off.” 😂

COOKIE CRUMBS

BITE SIZED TREATS

Twitter blew up this week after Elon got rid of everyone’s blue checkmark. Now, you can only get it if a “Verified Organization” associates your account with them. Now, if a celeb wants to get verified, they’d have to go through their management agency, who’d be on the hook for paying $1K a month to be a Verified Organization. It’s a terrible idea, and David Sacks, Mark Cuban, and Aaron Levie got into a heated debate about it on Twitter. LeBron James and Stephen King complained about it too, so Elon bought their checkmarks for them, LOL.

Amazing... Chamath now says crypto is dead in America. This is the dude who made a ton off of investing in bitcoin in 2011 and once proclaimed it’d get to $200K. LOL. Oh how the turns have tabled.. 

It was earnings week for Big Tech, and the TLDR is stock are up: MSFT beat, Alphabet beat, Meta beat, Spotify missed on revenue but still increased active users 

Apparently people hate Snapchat's AI bot. Ever since the feature launched, Snapchat pinned it to the top of the app without letting people get rid of it. Now their reviews in the app store have gotten so bad that its average rating this week is now 1.67 stars.

Google’s new foldable phone just got leaked, and it looks kinda cool.The phone unfolds into a tablet and is supposed to get announced in the next two weeks at Google I/O.

FROM THE COOKIE JAR

CHART OF THE WEEK

Looks kinda... short? 🥺 

Here's your weekly reminder to be present and embrace life. 

I'm not a ball of cheese, you're a ball of cheese!! 

POLL OF THE WEEK

HOW'RE YA FEELIN'?

So 90 years of life ain't a long time. We got a few thousand smart folks reading this newsletter, and we wanna know, what's your life satisfaction lookin' like these days? Do we need to call in some reinforcements?

Sound off 👇🏽

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CHOCOLATE CHIPS

OUR FAVORITE FINDS

SNICKERDOODLES

THURSDAY MEMES

😂 

 

That's all we got for ya this week, folks. See ya next Thursday!

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