Soundcloud addresses terms of use that say it has the right to train AI with users' music
Soundcloud issued a statement this weekend, addressing a story that began circulating a few days ago, when people looked through the music hosting service’s terms of use and found language stating that they’d been unknowingly granting the company permission to use their uploaded music as AI training data. “You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the services,” reads the service’s current terms of use. Online researchers looked back and found that the language had been inserted, with little fanfare, into the TOS back in February of 2024, even as the music hoster has continued to expand the number of generative AI tools it offers users who don’t want to do all that tricky work of, uh, making music.
Per Futurism, Soundcloud would like you to know that, while these new terms pretty clearly allow it to harvest music uploaded onto its service for AI training, it hasn’t actually done so. “SoundCloud has never used artist content to train AI models, nor do we develop AI tools or allow third parties to scrape or use SoundCloud content from our platform for AI training purposes,” a statement from the service today read. “In fact, we implemented technical safeguards, including a ‘no AI’ tag on our site to explicitly prohibit unauthorized use.” According to the service, the addition to its terms was meant to “clarify how content may interact with AI technologies within SoundCloud’s own platform. Use cases include personalized recommendations, content organization, fraud detection, and improvements to content identification with the help of AI Technologies.”
In a further statement to Futurism, Soundcloud said that professionally licensed music from “major labels” would be excepted from any AI-adjacent efforts in any case, and stated that, if it does decide to use the permissions carved out by the TOS to train AI on user’s music, it’ll introduce the clear option to opt-out “in advance.” Which is a very nice set of words—even if they aren’t remotely as legally binding as the contractual permissions embedded in the TOS, hence the intense nervousness that broke out when reports of the update began to circulate.