The Swedish music streaming giant Spotify reported earnings Tuesday: A $100 million loss in the quarter gone by but monthly active users up 11%, nearing 700 million.
Not sure what hold music they used for the earnings call today, but my gut tells me it wasn’t anything by the Velvet Sundown. That’s the band with 1 million monthly listeners that became a kind of viral sensation on Spotify when some internet detectives found signs that the band actually wasn’t a human band and that its songs were most likely made with artificial intelligence.
As of right now, Spotify isn’t labeling AI-generated music as AI-generated. But should they?
Nika Danilova, an indie synth pop recording artist, goes by the stage name Zola Jesus. She agreed to listen to Velvet Sundown and give a real-time review.
Danilova admitted the singer was surprisingly soulful. But overall, she’s not a fan. She said if she has to share a streaming platform with robots, listeners should know when they’re listening to AI.
“To put me alongside Velvet Sundown or whatever, it’s like, it feels a little condescending in a way. It kind of degrades the context of what I devoted my entire life for,” she said.
Spotify has not said publicly how much of its library it thinks is AI-generated and the company declined an interview request.
When French music streamer Deezer launched its own program to identify AI songs earlier this year, chief innovation officer Aurélien Hérault was surprised at just how prolific the robots were.
“It’s almost 20% of what we receive every day, not every year. It’s every day,” he said.
While identifying AI music isn’t a perfect science, Ed Newton-Rex, an AI music expert at the nonprofit Fairly Trained, said it’s technologically easier than identifying AI-generated text.
But he said the burden of saying something is made with AI should extend to AI music startups and their users.
“It needs to be made clear to everyone that when you generate a song and you distribute it on streaming platforms, you have to be open and honest about the fact that you’ve used AI to generate it,” he said.
Of course all this presumes that listeners will in fact prefer human-created music to AI creations.
Nika Danilova said she has changed her musical style in response to AI — more stripped down vocals and piano, less synth and computers. She said her fans have loved it.