Real “techno” on Spotify – streaming won’t ban music created by AI
At the beginning of the year, Spotify allowed a viral track with synthesized voices of Drake and The Weeknd to be uploaded to the platform, which caused dissatisfaction among music labels.
In an interview with the BBC, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek shared his thoughts on AI, noting that he does not plan to completely ban “artificial music” on the platform.
Eck believes that the new technology is perfectly acceptable for creating music, as long as it does not imitate artists without their consent. In particular, it offers three main “baskets” for AI in the industry:
- auto-tuning tools;
- tools that imitate artists who do not exist;
- the golden mean, where music was created under the influence of existing artists, but did not directly imitate them.
Although artificial intelligence is not completely banned on the platform, the company will not allow its content to be used for machine learning or AI models similar to those that can synthesize music.
Artists themselves are increasingly opposed to the use of artificial intelligence in creative industries. Last month, Irish musician Hozier announced that he would consider strikes because AI threatens his profession.
Neither Drake nor The Weeknd knew that their “cloned” voices were being used. The track was removed from Spotify and other platforms in April, and its creator Ghostwriter later tried to nominate the song for a Grammy Award, but his request was denied.
“You can imagine someone uploading a song pretending to be Madonna. We’ve seen pretty much everything in Spotify’s history to date in terms of people trying to trick our system. We have a very large team working on these kinds of issues,” Mr. Ek said.
In May, the Financial Times reported that thousands of tracks had been removed from Spotify after it was discovered that bots were used to artificially inflate streaming figures.
In the interview, Ek also noted that Spotify supports the Online Safety Bill, designed to make the Internet safer for children, as well as the Digital Markets Bill, which aims to improve competition by scrutinizing tech giants.
Daniel has long been a vocal critic of Apple and Google’s app store policies, which Spotify relies on. Both companies charge small developers a 15% commission for purchases in the program, and for developers with more than $1 million in revenue, this amount increases to 30%.
“At Spotify, we already give back almost 70% of our revenue to the creative community, and if we take away 30% of our share, it would effectively mean we’d be left with zero, which means we’d have to close up shop.”
Spotify also complains that Apple makes it difficult for businesses to communicate directly with their customers and promote their services elsewhere.
“We’re in a situation where two companies control how more than four billion consumers access the Internet,” Mr. Ek said.
In April, the European Commission accused Apple of violating EU competition rules following a Spotify complaint in 2020. In February, the claims against the company were reduced, although there was no final decision yet.
