Spotify and DistroKid's NEW Generative AI Tagging (is it enough?)

So Spotify now supports tagging AI usage in music on the platform and it's actually live right now. >> [singing] [music] >> This is an example of it by this artist Sunsetto who I I don't know but someone told me they have this credit so shout out to Sunsetto. Thanks for being the guinea pig for this but you can see that in the performer section there's generative AI for the synthesizer. So he used probably Suno I'm guessing to generate a synth line that he used or sampled in his song and he's disclosing the use of that generative AI here as a credited thing. So he's like not taking credit for that compositionally or performance-wise. And right now you can actually do this inside of DistroKid. So in DistroKid you have this section does this include this is song include AI generated music, vocals or lyrics? And apparently they don't want you to do it for mixing or mastering which is interesting which I guess kind of makes sense because it's not generative AI. Um but if you choose yes you get these options. So you can disclose if the song you're uploading had the lyrics written by AI, the music written by AI or both and as far as the audio goes is the the is like the artist that's doing this like an AI persona if the artist doesn't exist or is this like a actual human artist or group which is kind of an interesting thought like if you're a human artist or group why would Suno be writing all of the audio? I guess maybe maybe if maybe because there's people who use their real name and they upload so like they're a human artist even though you could probably debate if they're actually an artist if they're not writing any of the music or recording any of the music or is it a fake person? So that's probably what they're going for here like are you using your real name like Joe Schmo or is your AI persona like the dragon slayer >> [laughter] >> for example. And you can also say is it if it's part of the audio and then if you do part of the audio then you can do add more details and credits after uploading release. So then that's how you could go and say like generative AI did the guitar, generative AI did the did the drums which I I feel like part of this is forward thinking and not necessarily relevant for for now like this tagging individual instruments. Yes Suno does have this thing called Suno Studio where you can you can upload like certain audio tracks and then have it generate like sections for certain instruments and then you can like export those and throw them in your DAW. But most of the people uploading AI are are probably just doing whole songs or or whole sections of songs like whole vocals for example. Probably not individual chunks as much. But I have a feeling over the next 5 years we're probably going to see more DAWs having built-in generative features where this will become more and more of a thing where imagine a singer-songwriter records their strummed guitar and their singing and then they generate drums and bass behind it or something, right? Like that I could totally imagine that being a thing and it it allows like a solo singer-songwriter that has DAW to have a full production without paying any money. Again you could argue if that's good or bad for the industry. I'm not here to talk about that but that's probably coming, right? Is really my point and that's where these types of unique or these granular tagging things are going to become critical because that that artist I don't think is going to want to take credit for everything. They're going to they're will hopefully want to be pretty open that like yeah I wrote the song, I wrote the lyrics, I wrote the the chords and the the all the vocal parts and it's me strumming and it's me singing but I didn't do the drums and the bass or the piano. And no one else did. That was just generative AI whatever software we have 5 years from now. I I feel like a most actual artists will want to disclose that because if you're proud of your work you're proud of your work. You're not proud of someone else's work, right? Now a lot of people have been talking about this online and and kind of debating the functional the functionality of this, right? Because a lot of people want automatic tagging. This doesn't tag the song itself. Right? There's nothing on the song from the outside that shows hey this is this has generative AI in it. And I don't know if it's different if the whole song is tagged as being generated by AI. You have to right click it, go to view credits and then you see in the credits that it's there. So from like an industry perspective being able to see who did what this is this is good, right? But from the perspective of a listener wanting to not get bamboozled by falling in love with the song and then realizing it's AI um then this doesn't help that, right? And so so Deezer for example has been automatically tagging AI usage for a while. I talked to to someone from Spotify Sam Duboff recently and and we talked a little bit in our interview we had a very limited time about AI. And and their perspective generally the the vibe I got from the discussion was they don't want to be the ones like policing it and tagging it. They want to like give distributors the ability to have their customers manually tag things and they'll put it up there but they don't want to like take kind of deal with the arms race of trying to detect AI and then having new AI companies come up with ways to evade that detection. It sounds like they just really don't want to go down that rabbit hole. They just want to like let let people disclose it and they only want to step in when there's cases of outright fraud like someone trying to clone the sound of a human artist and like steal from them in some way. And at the time of filming this this article recently came out about that 44% of music on getting uploaded to Deezer every day is AI generated. So Deezer is the platform that automatically tags it. So I'm sure there's false flags, I'm sure they're missing stuff and I'm sure they're tagging stuff that isn't AI generated. So that's going to be a complicated beast going forward but 44% I can't imagine it's they're missing that much or they're over tagging that much. It's probably reasonably accurate. Like let's say it's off by 5%. Who cares, right? Even if it's off plus or minus 5% it's either 39% or 49% which is still crazy that over a third upwards of half of all the music being uploaded every day is AI generated. 75,000 tracks a day. And if people don't just distribute to one platform, right? They distribute to every platform with a place like DistroKid or TuneCore or CD Baby or The Orchard or TuneCore. So this is the same on Spotify, it's the same on Apple Music, it's the same on all of these platforms because all of these platforms allow it. Deezer is the only one that shows it. I personally I don't have a problem with fully AI generated music existing on these platforms. I don't like the fact that it dilutes the royalty pool a ton for artists that are pouring their heart and soul into their music like me. Like I just my I have an album just come out today. Like that I spent like 5 years working on or 7 years working on it technically. Not full-time right but on and off working on music. Um and I don't like the fact that music that you can crank out in seconds is regarded as equal in the platform. It it just doesn't seem reasonable. Um now strea- streaming platforms they don't necessarily care completely or they don't only care about the artists care about because they also care about their customers care about. Their actual customers are the listeners. And the thing is like listeners do care at least a lot of them do about what they're listening to and you see this in social media at least I do all the time where where people are are saying like they'll find a new band they love on TikTok and then they're commenting like like please let this be real and not AI. And a lot of people can't tell. Like I can tell most of the time when I hear something like that's obvious within 2 seconds is AI. But a lot of regular people can't but they want to. And Deezer does studies that show that something like uh 50% of people want to be able to know if what they're listening to is AI. It was like 55% but like 97% can't tell. And I bet the 3% that can are musicians like me or you, right? So it's it's a tricky thing to solve. I think this change is a massive step in the right direction. Because if it gets to the point where everyone is disclosing their AI usage and it's not villainized right? You disclose what AI used over time it's like okay cool this they used this thing and they used this thing. And the people that don't care if something's AI generated that 45% let them listen to it. If they like it who cares? Let them listen to it. That's how the world works. If someone wants to make it and someone wants to listen to it we got to let them listen to it, right? It's it's it's consensual at that point. Um that doesn't excuse the fact that Suno stole all of our music. That's a separate thing. Like we should all every like the Suno lawsuits are a thing um but separately from that if they can figure out the proper training and licensing of content I'm ethically fine with AI existing as long as they find a way to label it, make it fair and not have it have it have this huge advantage over human-made music. So glad Spotify has this feature. Uh Apple Music is apparently rolling out a similar feature soon and I'm assuming every other platform is going to copy copy them as well and I hope that this is just the first step and then over the next few years we just see Spotify and then other platforms getting even more bullish on like okay how do we detect AI usage? How do we make sure that people are being honest about their disclosure of generative AI? How do we make it so that it's not this unfair thing cuz is it going to be like in 3 years 99% of the music uploaded every day is AI generated? That's just silly, right? And I don't think Spotify wants that to happen either. So anyways, thanks for watching. You want to learn more about how you can market music human or generated AI generated I guess check out this playlist right here to see a whole bunch of tactics you can see about to promote your music. 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