You can’t escape AI — it’s everywhere — but depending on the service you’re talking about, you might be able to lessen the impacts.
Over on music services, a lot of tracks are appearing every day made with AI, with recent stats pointing to over 75,000 uploads daily, resulting in millions each month. It’s a number that partially points to the ease of use with which anyone can make AI music, but also to what it could be landing on services for: money.
Simply put, music can make money, even though that road is difficult for artists trying to build a following and make it big. But if you flood the services with enough tracks, there’s a chance you’ll also be paid out by systems recommending your music and inserting it into music lists, and that could be pulling real royalties from the mouths of artists.
It’s likely this reason that has prompted Spotify to remove millions of tracks recently, to the tune of roughly 75 million track removals over the space of the past year. The amount isn’t all AI tracks, but rather the kind Spotify labels as spammy and “AI slop”, which gives you a pretty good indication as to what it was: garbage intended for distribution.
Spotify already has rules regarding using technology to fake the sound of artists, and takes a hard line against artist impersonations with a policy for that, but that doesn’t mean every AI tracks will automatically be snared in its AI-focused net. In fact, most AI music — particularly tracks built as slop — may actually be quickly rendered from music platforms, using programming interfaces to speedily spin out sound for uploading en masse.
It comes as more of the world finds out what the big AI services are training their systems on, and the amount of music that has found its way to the platforms. Even here in Australia where there aren’t a lot of laws protecting artists from having their music trained from, Australian artists have found their music in the libraries, some of which may be clear from the systems allow you to do.
In terms of what this means, Spotify is likely taking a stand to prevent obvious AI music from solely flooding the catalogue and making money, removing those tracks in the process.
However, because AI can simply be labelled as “just a tool”, the use of AI isn’t what designates whether a track will be pulled or left alone. And with the music industry also using AI as to how it engineers tracks, it’s likely quite a bit will still be found, even if your recommendation lists may look a little different shortly.
