So much ink has been spilled everywhere about generative AI tools, and I almost hate to spend more airtime on it, but given the state of the music industry and artistic expression at large, it's impossible not to address.
Tape Trade is for the artists- this means a lot of things in different contexts, but given a tool like ours, where users upload their own content to review, listen and share, we want to be abundantly clear. When you upload your work to Tape Trade, we are not using it to train AI models, analyzing it, or otherwise scraping your data for working with LLMs or any type of generative tool. (Nor are we packaging your data and selling it to advertisers.)
Your work and your expression are yours.
Tape Trade, Inc. is a privately held and self-funded. Even saying privately held is a bit funny, because it sounds more dramatic than it is. There are three owners- and we formed a corporation because we live in different countries and this was the easiest way to share ownership. I mention all this because the fervor and hype around AI is driven broadly by market forces to boost investment, interest, and theoretically revenue- for a lot of publicly held companies, or start-ups looking for more funding. Pitching and selling "enterprise AI solutions" is an industry to itself, and the hype machine will roll on as long as the equity pours in. We are... completely outside this system. Our sole interest is to provide artists with a tool that makes their process easier.
It is by design that this is a paid service, because free tiers invite methods for business growth that put user experience at risk. (See our launch blog post for more on this.) These methods for growth are an anathema to a sustainable, useful product; methods like packaging data for advertisers, or analyzing content to train Generative AI models will ultimately result in devaluing users and their content. And- if there's one thing artists don't need more of, it's further devaluing their labor.
As a company, we are not anti-AI, so much as we are pro-human expression. All of us have used AI tools, but there is no business model at Tape Trade that uses your content to fuel some backroom AI tool to please some brief-case-carrying private equity goon. We say that with love, I'm sure there's a private equity goon with a really cool noise project out there, and we hope they try our product.
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