Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Musical AI

Musical AI’s attribution technology is essential infrastructure that will enable and accelerate every media-focused AI product. AI companies now have a seamless way to properly license, train, and use content while ensuring creators are credited and paid properly. As a leading investor in enterprise infrastructure for AI, Heavybit is proud to support Musical AI’s mission to shape the future of music and all media for everyone from artists and rightsholders to developers and innovators.” -Jesse Robbins, General Partner/Heavybit

The Heavybit Team is pleased to welcome Musical AI, the platform for AI rights management, to our portfolio. Musical AI brings much-needed clarity to a murky landscape of rights management in the age of large language models.

While the pace of innovation in AI has been exciting, it has raised a number of challenges, particularly with regard to managing rights for intellectual property. To generate their outputs, LLMs must first be trained on data, and a significant amount of what has already been fed to AI models includes copyrighted media, including music, movies, and TV shows.

There have already been high-profile legal battles between massive media publishers and leading AI vendors over what has been, until now, a complicated issue with very few clear solutions.

Why We’re Excited

Musical AI elegantly solves the thorny problem of rights management for AI training data. Up until now, content creators would simply dump copyrighted media into models for training, asking for neither permission nor forgiveness until the lawsuit was filed.

Musical AI offers training datasets to train models using fully licensed media within a fully secure environment that prevents download, extraction, or other unauthorized external use. The platform then uses an AI attribution system to track artistic contributions within the training data and sends reports to both media rightsholders and AI model holders.

As most major foundation models have already been trained on all the many zettabytes of data freely available worldwide, the team has built the Musical AI platform to scale for enterprise-grade usage. The platform’s catalog already accounts for more than 20 million licensed songs (with an ever-increasing library) and is compliant with major anti-piracy and international AI regulations.

Effectively, the team has built what creators, licensors, and AI startups have all been waiting for: A clear path to AI innovation and creativity that fairly tracks and compensates the contributions of original artists.

Going forward, the Musical AI team will focus on continuing to enhance its platform while growing its team. Learn more about Musical AI by visiting the website.

Meet the Founders

Sean Power

CEO and Co-Founder

Sean Power is the CEO and co-founder of Musical AI. A multi-time founder, author, and data expert, he has held leadership positions at MTV, Postrank (acquired by Google), and Techstars while serving as a board member and advisor to the Canadian and indigenous startup communities.

Matthew Adell

COO and Co-Founder

Matthew Adell is the COO and co-founder of Musical AI. He has spent much of his career at the intersection of music and technology, having previously founded the online music platform Metapop, and has served tours of duty at Beatport and Native Instruments.

Nicolas Gonzalez Thomas

CTO and Co-Founder

Nicolas Gonzalez Thomas is the CTO and co-founder of Musical AI. A musician, computer scientist, and entrepreneur, he has founded multiple startups and served as a researcher at Simon Fraser University and a data expert for Canadian telecom giant Telus.