AI and Likeness: Let’s Ask Merck Mercuriadis
Like most creative businesses, the industry has been roiled by AI. Much recent discussion has centered on the wave of slop washing over the DSPs and how to police it. But what about the thorny question of artist likeness, and how AI use by fans, fakers and agents of chaos can be controlled (and in some cases monetized)? We asked Hipgnosis head Merck Mercuriadis, who knows a thing or two about roiling the biz. We nodded and pretended to understand.
We’ve been talking to people about AI and likeness. What’s been your experience with this?
I have a lot of familiarity with NIL [name, image and likeness]—both from the point of view of being a manager and from the point of view of Hipgnosis being probably the biggest of acquirers—and it’s fraught with problems.
The Hipgnosis catalog was sold to Sony for over a billion dollars more than what I paid for it because of the quality of the content. This is the work of artists who’ve been extraordinarily successful, but they’re also artists of great cultural importance.
If you look at Neil Young, on the one hand, his catalog is valuable because of how wonderful the songs are and how great an artist he is. But it’s equally valuable because of the way Neil conducts himself; if you’re a Neil Young fan, you buy into the way he conducts himself. You identify with who he is as a person, and that’s why he’s been able to take you on this journey of 50, 60 years.
When you have an artist whose conduct is just as important to the value of their art as the songs, you can see how NIL is fraught with problems. At some point someone’s going to want to do something with Neil Young’s name, image and likeness, and that won’t sit well with Neil or his loyal audience, particularly if it doesn’t reflect the ethos on which he’s built his career—unless he can approve it in every way, shape and form.
There have already been changes to lyrics we wouldn’t let happen. Otherwise, you end up with Jefferson Starship and “We Fixed This Toilet.” Or allowing the words to Sting’s “Every Breath You Take,” one of the greatest songs of all time, changed to sell a search engine. That’s sacrilege. There are certain uses that just shouldn’t be allowed. And this is problematic with songs, it’s even worse with an artist’s name, image and likeness.
You’re a private person with strong beliefs, be they ethical, political, for social justice… And now someone is using your name, image and likeness to sell something that isn’t in keeping with the values on which you built your career and developed the sticky, wonderful relationship with your audience that allowed you to have a 20, 30, 40, 50, 60-year career. Your audience is suddenly looking at you and going, “Who the fuck is this person? Because that’s not who I know.”
What do you see as the potential upside, if any, of allowing a carefully curated set of aspects of one’s likeness and music to be imaginatively rejiggered by fans?
The thing that’s impossible, of course, is to have approval over everything, particularly when it’s your fans that are making something “user generated content”. You only have to go on to any particular artist’s Instagram page. If they say something against Trump, probably 50% of the audience is going to say, “Keep your nose out of politics.” Now let’s say that same audience, in those same percentages, start to create little vignettes of you doing what suits them but it’s diametrically opposed to your ethos. To some people in your audience, it’s OK to be to the right; to some people in your audience, it’s OK to be to the left.
It depends on who you are as an artist. If your ethos as an artist is anything goes, as long as I’m making money, then knock your socks off. But the great artists are the ones that do care about what they do and how they do it. But you have to control that like a motherfucker. So anything that allows your audience to do whatever they want to do with your name, image and likeness is a no-go.
Every artist has trolls. Every artist has fans that want you to know who they are, and sometimes the only way that they can get your attention is by doing shit that they know will upset you. If you’re a serious artist, you cannot be a part of that. That money comes at too high a price. You just have to say no.
How do you respond to the notion that there can be a tech that can manage these things based on your permission structure?
I don’t believe you.
You don’t believe it?
Because with tech, and with humans, there’ll always be error. We—we being Hipgnosis, me personally—fucked up at one point. When the famous game where Tom Brady, as the old man of football, was coming to Kansas City to play against Patrick Mahomes, the young version of Tom Brady, the NFL came to us and said, “We want to do this editorial piece where we use Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’ as we take you through Tom’s journey to get to this match and Patrick’s journey too.” Both were 24 years old when they won Super Bowls and as the song says, “24 and there’s so much more” so it read like a nice feel good moment. [Manager] Frank Gironda and I liked the script, and we sent it to Neil, and Neil had some trepidation about it, but ultimately Neil agreed with us and said yes.
Well, the NFL fucked us, because instead of being an editorial piece on Sunday Night Football it was presented as a commercial for the NFL’s forthcoming broadcast of that game. So it wasn’t just an editorial piece, it was commercial. It may not have been a commercial for beer or pizza, but the point was, it was being presented by a product. And of course, the Neil trolls immediately were like, “What the fuck, Neil?” And Neil quite rightly looked at us and went, “What the fuck, Merck? What the fuck, Frank?” So there’s always both human error and technical error even at the highest levels of care.
At one point, I was privileged to manage Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, the Pet Shop Boys, Morrissey and others, all at the same time. Above the surface, those artists couldn’t be more different from each other. Below the surface, their success was based on the exact same thing: integrity with their audience. That’s what you have to protect. As much as we hate calling it a brand—and trust me, we hate calling it a brand—at the end of the day, your name has meaning to your audience. We’re in the business of making money. We want art and commerce to go hand in hand, but the downside is too great. You must protect your art and you must protect your name, image and likeness. By the way the moral of the story is that Neil, as usual, was right!
A long time ago I heard something that I’ve always held dear: When you build a meaningful artist brand, every move you make puts all of your brand’s chips on the table.
Listen, if you want to see the likes of me or the likes of Irving Azoff or any of the managers you respect get shot—trust me, Irving’s too smart to ever say yes to technology using Don Henley’s or the Eagles’ name, image and likeness. That would be the first time in nearly 60 years of doing probably the greatest work for an artist that a manager’s ever done where Don Henley would turn around and shoot him.
Now, you can say, “Hey, Merck, you’re being old school, and the cat’s already out of the bag.” But it’s not, because you can still protect it. You can still stop it. When you have built a company or an artist of any meaning, the most powerful word in the vocabulary, and everyone knows this, is “no.”