AI-powered platform helps artists with music contracts and royalty agreement issues
The software flags clauses for concern, mistakes and omissions within lengthy and complex documents
A new AI-powered app aims to help artists make sense of and find potential issues in music contracts and royalty agreements.
musiclawyer.ai is a free tool which allows users to upload documents for analysis. It then feeds back any causes for concern, including mistakes, missing elements and clauses. English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, French and Japanese are all currently supported.
Developed by Grammy Award-winning audio engineer, producer, DJ, and record executive, Daddy Kev, AKA Kevin Moo, the software was unveiled this week on social media. In an interview with Resident Advisor, he revealed the technology would soon be able to draft basic contracts on behalf of users.
Powered by generative AI transformer ChatGPT and the Google-owned chatbot Gemini, musiclawyer.ai can "flawlessly" extract text from any image, including scanned documents. This is then 'read' by the programme, before an assessment is made on the content.
Although keen to point out musiclawyer.ai should not be considered a full alternative to professional legal representation, Moo described the app as "a tool for clarification and insight... Most independent artists I know cannot afford to hire an attorney, so in lieu of no other viable options, my hope is the app is useful."
Although not yet live, a new royalty audit statement analysis will also soon be available. Reportedly, a trial run of this functionality flagged more than 30 significant issues, including missing ISRC identification numbers, which are used to identify individual recordings. Currently, most disputes over royalties rely on statements from various stakeholders, which can prove unreliable.
Moo, who co-founded the sorely missed experimental hip-hop party Low End Theory and appeared in a DJ Mag feature on audio compression, also shared news of another app this week, originally developed for his Alpha Pup label catalogue. Spotstats, which is still in BETA mode, estimates daily, monthly, and yearly streaming revenue, giving users the opportunity to run an independent audit on Spotify for Artists data and forecast future plays.
