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The enhanced protections will help musicians who use the app’s SoundOn service identify misused audio tracks and combat copyright violations.
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TikTok has added a new protection process for musicians who use its SoundOn platform to distribute their music. The enhanced copyright detections will alert artists to potential copies of their work.
Through SoundOn, which is owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, musicians can upload their music for distribution across TikTok. SoundOn also connects artists to all of the major music platforms, making it a valuable way for musicians to connect with their audiences.
TikTok will now also offer more copyright protection through a partnership with automatic content recognition platform ACRCloud, which will see SoundOn incorporate advanced audio recognition technology to detect copies of an artist’s work.
As explained by TikTok: “ACRCloud’s newly-developed Derivative Works Detection service enables music distributors and music streaming platforms to identify copyrighted tracks in their catalogs, even when those tracks have been significantly altered through speed or pitch shifting. Using advanced audio recognition, it ensures modified works are detected, supporting copyright compliance and proper monetization while protecting original creators’ rights.”
The enhanced protection could be increasingly valuable in the age of artificial intelligence, with AI tools taking inspiration from existing tracks to make up new songs that closely replicate the original.
AI tools are derivative by nature, in that they take samples of existing content in order to output similar material based on user prompts. That means that AI tools are incapable of generating wholly original sounds, which greatly increases the chance that these processes will churn out songs that sound very similar, if not exactly like, other music.
As such, having more tools to detect similar songs could help to combat copyright violations, and ensure that artists get the credit for their original creations as much as possible.
The only potential downside is that musicians have faced various challenges with this type of technology, in that it often misidentifies content, and can sometimes penalize creators for use of their own work. Presumably, this advanced approach has improved on this, meaning fewer errors in assessment.
TikTok said that this expanded detection service from ACRCloud will build on its existing anti-fraud measures, which also include pre- and post-distribution reviews of every track, and rigorous customer identification processes.