Flou: An Affordable AI Music Lawyer

Tired of handshake deals turning into legal nightmares? Confusion at live shows because there was no contract? Can’t afford a “real” lawyer? While not a substitute for music attorneys, Flou is an affordable AI music lawyer that helps musicians, producers, and managers create and manage music contracts.

Flou: An Affordable AI Music Lawyer

by Bobby Owsinski via Music 3.0

Everyone in the music business has gone through it. There’s a situation where you know you should have a legal agreement and you go, “It will be too expensive” and rely on a handshake instead. Then you don’t have an agreement going forward and no one exactly remembers the terms you agreed on when push comes to shove. Sometimes it’s not a big deal, but when it is friendships can be lost and you can incur larger legal bills than you ever dreamed. It doesn’t have to be that way though. Artificial intelligence is helping us in so many ways today, and Flou may be an answer when it comes to creating legal agreements at a reasonable price.

Flou allows you to create, sign, and manage a host of common musical legal contracts. It’s aimed at managers, artists, producers, labels, and publishers, and generates agreements in both english and spanish.

It can come in handy for split sheet agreements between songwriters, and agreements between producer and artist, artist and manager, artist and indie label, and so much more.

All you do is choose a contract template, answer a few questions served up by the AI co-pilot, and then get it signed on any device. It then files the agreement in a way that you always know where it’s at, and can keep track of all your legal docs so you never have to worry about where everything is.

Limitations

That’s not to say that a dedicated music attorney isn’t useful. When it comes to negotiating deal points, nothing beats a seasoned professional, and Flou won’t advise you on contracts that come to you from a major publisher or label that you need professional eyes on. Good music attorneys also provide career advice, which can be invaluable and even priceless.

But for simple everyday agreements that artists, bands, songwriters, and producers sometimes face, the service can save you a lot of money in the long run.

Don’t confuse what Flou does with the stories we’ve heard of attorneys that have used AI (usually a large language model like ChatGPT) to site previous cases in court filings where the judge finds that the cases were figments of the AI’s imagination.

AI today is excellent if limited to a single or just a functions, like noise reduction in audio, or facial recognition. In this case, the scope of what the AI is asked to do isn’t all that much, so it has a low possibility of going off the rails.

That said, if the agreement is critical or there are a lot of negotiating points, it’s still best that you employ an experienced, dedicated music attorney.

You can find out more about Flou by clicking the link (there’s also a free interactive royalty calculator on the site that you might find useful). It’s $99 per month.

Bobby Owsinski is a producer/engineer, author, blogger, podcaster, and coach. He has authored 24 books on music production, music, the music business, music AI, and social media.