Music services vary wildly when it comes to how they compete for a slice of your wallet and bank account, differing from beyond the basics of merely offering music for a monthly fee.
While the typical cost of $11 to $15 monthly usually gets most of the same tracks, the features are usually different. For instance, Apple Music bundles lossless audio and spatial in with its offering, not to mention a bunch of live DJ sets and a specific classical app, some of the reasons why we regularly give the service a Best Pick award.
Depending on the YouTube Music account, you might get ad-free YouTube viewing, while Amazon bundles in podcast listening as part of its offering. And Deezer has a system that auto-detects AI music and identifies it for you, doing something no other service appears to be actively doing.
The AI side of things is particularly interesting, because over in the world of Spotify, you actually have an AI DJ that can take over your feed, guessing what you want to listen to, or letting you outright tell it, making for one of the times Spotify dabbled with AI.
But it’s clearly not the only time, because more is coming.
This week, Spotify has announced that it’s teaming up with Universal Music to launch an extra feature for Spotify Premium users that will let them use generative AI to make covers of real songs on the platform, as well as also make remixes of music, as well.
The concept will essentially see a music service hand the keys of remixing to people willing to pay for the privilege, though the company hasn’t quite said how that would work in the app. Given that AI music platform Udio has an agreement with Universal Music, it’s likely the technology comes out of that, and may be similar.
Spotify’s addition isn’t the only AI feature the service plans on making, either, with a new variation of the Spotify desktop app called “Studio” that can access music, podcasts, and audiobooks alongside email, calendar, and other notes to work out recommendations, helped in part by improvements to the platform’s AI models trained on these signals to improve recommendations on the whole.
There’s no word on when these features will officially roll out for customers, but subscribers may want to expect them later this year.
