Latest news with #Suno
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Suno snaps up WavTool for its AI music editing tools amid ongoing dispute with music labels
Suno, the AI music company currently in a legal battle with music labels, announced on Thursday the acquisition of WavTool, a browser-based AI digital audio workstation (DAW). This acquisition aims to improve Suno's editing capabilities for songwriters and producers. WavTool, launched in 2023, offers several tools to musicians, such as stem separation, AI audio generation, and an AI music assistant. Suno will integrate WavTool's technology into its new editing interface, which launched this month. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. A company spokesperson noted that 'most' of the WavTool employees moved to Suno's product and engineering teams, although the exact number of those who did not make the move wasn't revealed. The acquisition comes on the heels of yet another lawsuit against the company. Country musician Tony Justice and his music label, 5th Wheel Records, filed a lawsuit against Suno earlier this month, alleging that Suno used copyrighted sound recordings to train its AI music generator. This allegation is similar to lawsuits filed last year by Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment against Suno for copyright infringement. According to Bloomberg, the major music labels are in licensing talks with Suno. Suno acquired WavTool a few months ago, with the browser-based DAW going offline in November. Timing the announcement for this week seems intentional, possibly aimed at diverting attention from the lawsuit. Legal disputes often shake investor confidence, so the announcement of this acquisition may serve as a way to reassure them that the company remains committed to growth. The AI startup secured $125 million in funding this past May. Inicia sesión para acceder a tu portafolio
TechCrunch
15 hours ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Startups Weekly: Tech and the law
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can't miss from the world of startups. Want it in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here. Before this newsletter takes a break for the Fourth of July next week, here are the startup stories and funding rounds that caught our eye over the last few days, which have been quite busy. Most interesting startup stories from the week Image Credits:SOPA Images / Contributor / Getty Images This week brought us lawsuit updates, M&As, and a combination of both. AI agents: Data cybersecurity company Rubrik acquired Predibase to accelerate the adoption of AI agents by its users. The startup, which helps companies fine-tune AI models, had raised some $28 million in venture capital. Deal amount wasn't disclosed but was reportedly sizable. Sailing: German startup Kadmos, which had raised $38 million in external capital for its salary payment platform for seafaring workers, got acquired by NYK Line as part of the Japanese shipping firm's efforts to expand its fintech services. Red herring? Embattled AI music startup Suno announced the acquisition of WavTool, a browser-based AI digital audio workstation, in a deal that actually happened a few months ago but that it chose to disclose on the heels of yet another copyright lawsuit. Unstable ground: Getty Images dropped its primary lawsuit against Stability AI, the startup behind AI image generator Stable Diffusion, but other lawsuits continue, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Weathering the storm: Despite headwinds, Bill Gates-backed startup Airloom Energy is pressing on and started building its first wind power plant in Wyoming. Most interesting VC and funding news this week Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour at StrictlyVC 2025. Image Credits:TechCrunch Another week, another $300 million round — sometimes at wildly different valuations, even for the same company. Meanwhile, the small deals keep things interesting, too. Same amount, new valuation: Harvey AI raised a $300 million Series E co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue. This comes only four months after Sequoia led a $300 million Series D at a $3 billion valuation into the AI-enabled legal tech startup, which is now valued at $5 billion. AI scribe: Abridge, an AI startup automating medical notes, secured a $300 million Series E led by a16z at a $5.3 billion valuation. Crypto predictions: Blockchain-based prediction market platform Kalshi raised a $185 million round at a $2 billion post-money valuation, while rival Polymarket is reportedly working on closing a $200 million round at a pre-money valuation around $1 billion. Money in the bank: Finom, a challenger bank that targets SMBs across Europe, raised some $133 million in a Series C round of funding that comes in addition to the $105 million in growth funding it secured from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund a few weeks ago. Flying high: Indian drone startup Raphe mPhibr raised $100 million in an all-equity Series B round led by General Catalyst. Its customers include the Indian Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as armed police forces. Easy dictation: AI-powered dictation app Wispr Flow locked in $30 million in a Series A that brought its total funding to $56 million. The company also released an iOS app earlier this month. Upcycled: Novoloop, a startup that upcycles waste plastic, raised a $21 million Series B to finalize the design and begin the construction of its first commercial-scale plant. Data processing for AI: Eventual, a startup inspired by a data-processing problem its founders encountered at Lyft, raised two rounds of funding totaling $27.5 million within eight months. AI voices: Synthflow AI, a Berlin-based no-code platform that lets enterprises build and deploy customized white-label voice AI customer service agents, raised a $20 million Series A led by Accel. As the name suggests: Better Auth, the third Ethiopian startup to graduate from YC, raised $5 million in seed funding. Its open source framework promises to simplify how developers manage user authentication and has quickly become popular. Eternal light: Space startup Lux Aeterna came out of stealth with $4 million in pre-seed funding and the ambition to launch a reusable satellite in 2027. Last but not least Image Credits:Dani Padgett / StrictlyVC After a two-year break from public life, seasoned early-stage investor, entrepreneur, and author Brad Feld is back with his ninth book, 'Give First.' TechCrunch interviewed him about it and more.
TechCrunch
2 days ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Suno snaps up WavTool for its AI music editing tools amid ongoing dispute with music labels
Suno, the AI music company currently in a legal battle with music labels, announced on Thursday the acquisition of WavTool, a browser-based AI digital audio workstation (DAW). This acquisition aims to improve Suno's editing capabilities for songwriters and producers. WavTool, launched in 2023, offers several tools to musicians, such as stem separation, AI audio generation, and an AI music assistant. Suno will integrate WavTool's technology into its new editing interface, which launched this month. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed. A company spokesperson noted that 'most' of the WavTool employees moved to Suno's product and engineering teams, although the exact number of those who did not make the move wasn't revealed. The acquisition comes on the heels of yet another lawsuit against the company. Country musician Tony Justice and his music label, 5th Wheel Records, filed a lawsuit against Suno earlier this month, alleging that Suno used copyrighted sound recordings to train its AI music generator. This allegation is similar to lawsuits filed last year by Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment against Suno for copyright infringement. According to Bloomberg, the major music labels are in licensing talks with Suno. Suno acquired WavTool a few months ago, with the browser-based DAW going offline in November. Timing the announcement for this week seems intentional, possibly aimed at diverting attention from the lawsuit. Legal disputes often shake investor confidence, so the announcement of this acquisition may serve as a way to reassure them that the company remains committed to growth. The AI startup secured $125 million in funding this past May. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW
Straits Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
AI cannibals eat into $26 billion music market
What's worrying is the extent to which AI music is overwhelmingly cannibalising, not feeding, the human artists on which it was trained without compensation, says the writer. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: UNSPLASH The song Echoes Of Tomorrow is a laid-back, catchy tune that might happily slot into summertime playlists on Spotify or Apple Music. Only the lyrics, which make curious references to 'algorithms', reveal its non-human creator: artificial intelligence. The track's mimicry of flesh-and-blood pop is pretty unsettling. Yet, what's really disturbing is the sheer quantity of similar AI tunes sloshing around online. Tools like Udio and Suno, trained on millions of songs crafted by human artists, are now churning out millions of their own tunes at the click of a button. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
The Star
5 days ago
- Business
- The Star
Music streaming service Deezer adds AI song tags in fight against fraud
LONDON: Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters. Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being wielded to earn royalties fraudulently. The app will display an on-screen label warning about "AI-generated content" and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created with song generators. Deezer is a small player in music streaming, which is dominated by Spotify, Amazon and Apple, but the company said AI-generated music is an "industry-wide issue.' It's committed to "safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into question in favor of training AI models," CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release. Deezer's move underscores the disruption caused by generative AI systems, which are trained on the contents of the internet including text, images and audio available online. AI companies are facing a slew of lawsuits challenging their practice of scraping the web for such training data without paying for it. According to an AI song detection tool that Deezer rolled out this year, 18% of songs uploaded to its platform each day, or about 20,000 tracks, are now completely AI-generated. Just three months earlier, that number was 10%, Lanternier said in a recent interview. AI has many benefits but it also "creates a lot of questions" for the music industry, Lanternier told The Associated Press. Using AI to make music is fine as long as there's an artist behind it but the problem arises when anyone, or even a bot, can use it to make music, he said. Music fraudsters "create tons of songs. They upload, they try to get on playlists or recommendations, and as a result they gather royalties,' he said. Musicians can't upload music directly to Deezer or rival platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. Music labels or digital distribution platforms can do it for artists they have contracts with, while anyone else can use a "self service' distribution company. Fully AI-generated music still accounts for only about 0.5% of total streams on Deezer. But the company said it's "evident" that fraud is "the primary purpose" for these songs because it suspects that as many as seven in 10 listens of an AI song are done by streaming "farms" or bots, instead of humans. Any AI songs used for "stream manipulation' will be cut off from royalty payments, Deezer said. AI has been a hot topic in the music industry, with debates swirling around its creative possibilities as well as concerns about its legality. Two of the most popular AI song generators, Suno and Udio, are being sued by record companies for copyright infringement, and face allegations they exploited recorded works of artists from Chuck Berry to Mariah Carey. Gema, a German royalty-collection group, is suing Suno in a similar case filed in Munich, accusing the service of generating songs that are "confusingly similar' to original versions by artists it represents, including "Forever Young' by Alphaville, "Daddy Cool' by Boney M and Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5.' Major record labels are reportedly negotiating with Suno and Udio for compensation, according to news reports earlier this month. To detect songs for tagging, Lanternier says Deezer uses the same generators used to create songs to analyse their output. "We identify patterns because the song creates such a complex signal. There is lots of information in the song,' Lanternier said. The AI music generators seem to be unable to produce songs without subtle but recognisable patterns, which change constantly. "So you have to update your tool every day," Lanternier said. "So we keep generating songs to learn, to teach our algorithm. So we're fighting AI with AI.' Fraudsters can earn big money through streaming. Lanternier pointed to a criminal case last year in the US, which authorities said was the first ever involving artificially inflated music streaming. Prosecutors charged a man with wire fraud conspiracy, accusing him of generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and using bots to automatically stream them billions of times, earning at least US$10mil (RM42.8mil). – AP
