In this photo illustration, the Warner Music Group company logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. Piotr Swat/Getty Images

Warner Music Group has acquired Sureel, an AI attribution start-up. Through the acquisition of this company, WMG hopes to better track when their songs and recordings are used in the training of AI models or in AI-generated works.

A press release about the deal notes that Sureel has multiple patents to create “AI DNA” for every generated work from an AI music model. It claims that this can break down the generated work into component parts and attribute how those have been used.

“AI powers a large fan engagement and value creation opportunity for our industry, while making the human provenance of music more important than ever,” says Robert Kyncl, CEO of WMG. “Bringing Sureel into WMG strengthens our capability for protection, control and monetization and ensures that the creative community remains in control of its intellectual property, name, image, likeness and voice. We look forward to working with Tamay and his team to advance all of their incredible work.”

Sureel also offers intellectual property provenance, audit and compliance reporting, model optimization and AI business intelligence. The start-up is also growing its NIL (name, image and likeness) attribution suite to track how artists’ voices and performance identities are used in AI training and generation. This can help with policing voice clones, deepfakes, AI-generated avatars and other style replication unique to an artist.

Though the company is now part of the WMG ecosystem, Sureel will continue to operate as a standalone platform, according to the press release.

“Rightsholders deserve to know how AI interacts with their work, and to share fairly in the value it creates,” adds Dr. Tamay Aykut, CEO and founder of Sureel. “Sureel was built to make that possible, and with WMG’s backing, we can deliver on our mission at scale, building a more transparent and fair future and driving value growth for the whole music and entertainment ecosystem.”

The deal may help Warner uphold its promise, outlined in its announcement about its deal with Suno, which says that “artists and songwriters will have full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in new AI-generated music.”

AI attribution, however, remains a debated topic. While it is an incredibly popular idea in the music industry — given it could allow individual artists and songwriters to be paid in accordance to when their specific works are cited by AI models — experts in the AI field appear divided over whether or not it’s possible at this stage. According to Luminate, over 100,000 songs are added to streaming services daily, making it difficult to trace back influences on an AI model at the scale and complexity needed to be effective.

On Tuesday (June 9), the topic came up at Digital Media Association’s (DIMA) Summer Meeting at Pier 57 in New York City. Laurent Hubert, CEO of Kobalt, was asked about attribution by an audience member, and he said: “We cannot just dismiss [the idea of attribution] and say that can’t work, which, by the way, may be the eventual conclusion. Let’s say you find a solution for attribution, first you have to pressure test the solutions, you have to make sure also they are, in my view, done in ways that is as unbiased as possible. How you check for that, I’m not entirely sure. Then you have to think about how you operationalize, and we’ve seen tremendous amount of fragmentation in copyright ownership over the last 10-15 years, which has added operational tension.”

In recent months, WMG has announced a number of deals, including an April announcement of its acquisition of Revelator. Founded in 2012, the company specializes in digital music distribution, rights management, royalty accounting and real-time analytics. The company will be used to bolster the offerings WMG’s in-house distributor, ADA, can offer. In May, the major music company also announced a new deal with Paramount to create films based on their artists and writers.

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