Who owns Taylor Swift's voice?

Ben Evans on Threads;

It's a lot easier to understand the IP issues in 'give me this song but in Taylor Swift's voice' than 'make me a song in the style of the top ten hits of the last decade.' If a human did that, they wouldn't necessarily have to pay anyone, so why would an LLM?

There's an interesting twist with the "Taylor Swift's voice" example; Scooter Braun owns all of Taylor Swift's recordings (at least, I think all the ones released before any ChatGPT-era training dataset were compiled) - he bought the record company, so he owns the master recordings (and all the copies of the master recordings, and the rights relating to them) - but not the songs themselves. Taylor Swift still owns them - which is why she can make her "Taylor's Version" re-recordings (which Scooter Braun doesn't get a penny out of.)

So there's a key difference here; a human would copy the songs (that is, they would be working off the version of the songs that are in their heads - the idea of the songs), so Swift would get paid as the owner of the songs.

But the kind of generative AI we're talking about would be copying 100% from the recordings (ie. the training data would be the sounds, digitised and converted into a stream of numbers) - which Swift doesn't own. The AI doesn't "see" the idea of the songs - it wouldn’t “know” what the lyrics were, what key the songs were in, what chords were being played on what instrument - any more than a Large Language Model “knows” what the words in its (tokenised) training dataset or output mean.

She still owns her songs, but she’s sold her voice.

Somebody, make it stop

Well, my son is learning to play the guitar - at 13, he's about the age I was when I started learning, but he's been playing for a good few years and it won't be long until he's better than me at 45 (if he isn't already...)

One of the songs he's learning with his guitar teacher at the moment is Smells Like Teen Spirit - which came out in 1991, when I was about the same age that he is now and also learning how to play it on the guitar.

Which got me wondering - if I was playing something when I was 13 that is as old as that song he's playing is now, what would I have been playing? I know that I was playing 'old stuff' at the time - learning a lot of Jimi Hendrix riffs, some Beatles, some Cream etc. After all, the '60s were a hell of a decade for guitar heroes…

Well, I did the maths, and the equivalent for me in 1991 would have to have been a song from 1959. That wasn't just before all the "old" stuff from the (late) 1960s that I would have been playing- that was a time when Jimi Hendrix was still "Jimmy Hendrix" and learning how to play on his first $5 acoustic guitar. Keith Richards was still studying at technical college, and The Beatles hadn't even started playing with Pete Best yet - let alone Ringo. Elvis Presley was in the army, discovering amphetamines and meeting the 14 year old girl who he would marry seven years later. Tamala Motown had only just been formed.

Oddly though, it was also the year that the most valuable Gibson Les Pauls were made - even though it was still years until they would become famous, thanks to the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Peter Green.

Anyway, now I feel old.