More AI-generated music has hit Spotify, and creators are concerned that this competes with authentic work.
We now have at the very least three major AI tools within the text-to-audio (or, perhaps more to the purpose, text-to-music) space: Udio, Suno, and Limewire.
While music production has change into heavily democratized because the Nineteen Eighties and 90s, anyone can now produce natural-sounding music in seconds.
From there, it just takes a number of actions to upload it to streaming platforms and monetize.
Ex-Stability Audio team leader Ed Newton-Rex, who has now change into a firm advocate for the correct licensing of knowledge by generative AI corporations, dropped at attention a number of obviously AI-generated songs which have racked up hundreds of listens.
Spotify is actively recommending AI music made by AI models that could be trained on copyrighted music without permission. 240k monthly listeners for this ‘artist’. Half 1,000,000 streams of the highest track.
This eats into the royalty pool available to human musicians.
Generative… https://t.co/Z9semlqrO8
It’s evidence of an existential challenge facing the music industry.
As Newton-Rex points out, AI-generated music created by tools trained on authentic music now competes with the very authentic music it was created from.
This mirrors a near-identical situation within the visual arts, where tools like MidJourney, trained on vast quantities of knowledge without copyright holders’ permissions, now directly compete with artists in industries like graphic design.
Not everyone is worried about this, nonetheless. Technological democratization has been key to art’s evolution, particularly in the previous couple of centuries, dragging it from the purview of the upper classes to something wider society can create and have interaction with.
Some query also: what’s ‘authentic’ creative work in our digital era, anyway?
If AI’s role in art is somewhat permitted, who draws the road when it becomes unacceptable?
Should people make indiscriminate moral judgments of creators who wield AI? Is this practical or useful?
For many, nonetheless, the crux is that AI corporations haven’t paid for the information they used to create their models. That seems quite clear-cut, at the very least.
Spotify and other streaming corporations will light the best way
One of the only fixes here is de-monetizing and even de-platforming AI-generated music.
Major platforms like Spotify, record labels, and massive artists hold the largest influence over future trajectories. However, implementing Draconian measures to terminate AI’s use in music is unrealistic.
In late 2023, Spotify became the middle of the AI music controversy when it reportedly removed tens of hundreds of AI-generated songs uploaded by Boomy, an AI music generator.
The move got here amid suspicions that bots were artificially inflating the play counts of those tracks, illustrating the challenge streaming services face in ensuring fair compensation for human creators while combating fake streams and bot-driven manipulation of royalty pools.
The incident was followed by a rare public interview in September 2023 with Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, who went some option to make clear the platform’s stance on AI-generated music.
Ek stated that while Spotify would proceed to host AI-generated content, it wouldn’t support tracks impersonating real artists without their consent.
This got here after Spotify removed the AI-generated song “Heart on My Sleeve,” which featured the voices of Drake and The Weeknd without their permission. “Heart on My Sleeve” was later refused to be considered for a Grammy.
Ek identified three distinct applications of AI in music: tools that enhance music production, those who imitate real artists (which Spotify doesn’t support), and a fancy category where AI-created music is evidently influenced by real artists but doesn’t impersonate them directly.
Concerns about AI’s impact on the music industry have since continued to grow as tools like Suno and Udio improve text-to-audio technology.
In April 2024, over 200 outstanding artists, including Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Pearl Jam, R.E.M, Chase & Status, and Jon Bon Jovi, vowed to tackle AI music head-on, while the US SAG-AFTRA performer’s union negotiated with record labels for defense for artists from AI music.
Another subtext here is that these big artists will hold much more power within the AI music era.
They have the eyes and ears to identify AI music created with their assets, the financial clout to sue, and influence over record labels.
Some artists have already struck deals to monetize their musical assets to corporations for AI tools. T-Pain, John Legend, and 7 others entered a deal to enable YouTube to copy their voices as a feature for Shorts “to shape the longer term of AI in music.”
One thing amongst all this seems certain – the small indie music producer with fewer bargaining chips will feel the total force of AI-generated music before anyone else.
