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After debuting a generative AI feature last year that produces music in the style of famous artists like Charli XCX, John Legend, and T-Pain<\/a>, YouTube is now asking major record labels to allow it to clone more musicians. According to the Financial Times<\/em><\/a>, the Google-owned video platform is offering to pay Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records \u201clump sums of cash\u201d in exchange for licensing their songs to legally train its AI music tools.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n YouTube told the Financial Times<\/em> that it\u2019s not looking to expand Dream Track<\/a> \u2014 which was supported by just ten artists during its test phase \u2014 but confirmed it was \u201cin conversations with labels about other experiments.\u201d The platform is aiming to license music from \u201cdozens\u201d of artists according to the report, which will instead be used to train new AI tools that YouTube is planning to launch later this year. The fee that YouTube is willing to pay for these licenses hasn\u2019t been disclosed, but the report says these will likely be one-off payments rather than royalty-based arrangements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n News of these discussions comes just days after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing record labels like Sony, Warner, and Universal, filed separate copyright infringement lawsuits<\/a> against two of the top companies in generative AI music. The labels allege that outputs from Suno and Udio<\/a> were produced using \u201cunlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale,\u201d with the RIAA seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n