BCKSTG · The Lookup

Is your music inDISCO-12M?

12,320,916 YouTube tracks. And counting. About 91 years of music. Already on a public AI training dataset. Type your artist name. See how many of yours are in it.

Read the story: 12,320,916 YouTube tracks are already training an AI

What it is

12,320,916 tracks. Already in the wild.

DISCO-12M is a list of YouTube videos, packaged so any AI lab can train a music model on them. LAION put it on Hugging Face. Anyone with a download button has it.

DISCO-12M is not the only one. SLEEPING-DISCO 9M and DISCO-10M are separate public datasets built the same way. This tool searches DISCO-12M only. If you are not in it, you could still be in one of the others.

The dataset doesn’t include the audio. It includes the YouTube ID for every track, which is all anyone needs to pull the song and train on it.

Who carries it

Independents. Especially in Spanish.

Major labels have legal departments. You don’t. LAION-DISCO-12M was pulled from YouTube, which is also the distribution platform, discovery engine, and de facto release valve for most independent music in the first place. There isn’t really an opt-out.

The Atlantic’s AI Watchdog beat has been tracking these releases as they land, and their tool searches across several of these datasets. We were only able to obtain this one, LAION-DISCO-12M, so our lookup covers less ground than theirs.

What you do today

Three moves. Before the courts decide anything.

One. Screenshot your result with the date for your own records. The real record is the public dataset on Hugging Face, which anyone can check.

Two. Ask the host to pull you. Takedowns live on the dataset page, not at LAION or Google.

Three. Watch the Lyria 3 case. Whatever the court rules sets the template for the next dataset.

The full story on Playback

Google says you licensed it when you uploaded to YouTube.

How Google’s motion to dismiss the Lyria 3 lawsuit frames your YouTube upload, what DISCO-12M actually is, and why the only coverage so far has been in English.