Spotify Is Making Their Own AI Music Product?

Spotify just made some huge announcements when it comes to AI music and how AI music is treated on Spotify. And there's actually two big updates that we're going to walk through today. One is their post about Spotify starting AI protections for artists, songwriters, and producers, which goes through like fraud protection and them actually removing a lot of AI generated music. And the second is Spotify, this one's super new, October 16th. I don't know when this video is going to go live, but um the major labels plus Merlin and Believe are partnering with Spotify to develop artists first AI music products, which who the heck knows what that means, but we're going to get into it in this video. So, let's start off with this first thing because this actually came out in September, about a month ago. Probably by the time this video goes live, would be more than a month. Um but this one is interesting because this focused on a few very specific things that they are trying to fix inside of Spotify. For example, they talk about how there's been way too many tracks pushed to Spotify and also how there's all this this impersonation problem that's happening. And you might have seen this too for some artists where you get recommended in your release radar. It looks like it's a song by like Red Hot Chili Peppers or whatever and then you click on it and it's not. It's a new song uploaded to the profile but just AI generated sloped to sound like them. Um, and that ties in with a huge impersonation problem at Spotify. Technically, anyone can upload music under any artist name and just claim that it should be on their profile. And it's kind of a nightmare for artists to get taken down. This focused on three things. Improving their impersonation system, filtering out spam, and how to disclose AI generated content on Spotify. Let's start with the impersonation because that's what this article does as well. They have a new impersonation policy to deal with AI voice clones. So, for example, if you made an AI voice clone of Ed Sheeran and upload that, you can't use his voice without permission. There's a lot of websites where you can go and make songs with like Ed Sheeran's voice or Chester Bennington's voice or whatever, right? And none of those are legal, but they all exist because the law hasn't caught up with the technology. So Spotify is stepping in and saying the law is not caught up but we can make sure that this isn't allowed in our platform because like eventually that stuff's going to become illegal, right? It's it it makes no sense to allow legally be able to clone someone's voice, right? I think everyone agrees on that. Also giving artist certain protections and clearer recourse. So, for example, if an artist pushes music to your profile, you wouldn't be able to actually get it off of your profile until the song came out. So, even if you saw an upcoming, you couldn't actually get it removed until it came out. So, now you're going to be able to report this stuff prior to the music even coming out and also reducing the wait time because imagine if like all of a sudden you you see on your profile someone else uploaded music to your profile and it takes like two weeks for them to remove it. like that person's song is on your page for like two weeks. It might be harming your brand reputation. It might be stealing revenue. It might be messing up with another release. So, the fact that they're focusing on this is actually huge. And this isn't necessarily just AI related. This happens with like actual regular humanmade music too. It's been happening for a long time. I know I I've I've worked with some people who like they've actually used it as a marketing method where they would push music to other people's huge artists profile without their permission. They they essentially hired us to run an ad campaign to promote their their music and then we're in their Spotify artists and we're like how do you have all these collabs with these big artists? And it turns out they were just publishing it to the platform without their will. that part we weren't involved in, but that's when I first saw that like how easy it was for them to just distribute a song to a huge artist profile. I I was pretty shocked that they were able to just do that and and make a ton of money from it, too. So, this is huge. This is a huge thing. The next thing is the music spam filter. Identify uploaders and tracks engaging in tactics that are are like mass uploading, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short tracks, and other types of slop. So this isn't about removing all AI music or disallowing AI generated music. This is about like the lowest common denominator of AI generated music. For example, people might generate hundreds of songs with different just words. For example, they might make a song called like January love song, February love song, March love song, April love like every month the year and then January hate song, February hate, right? They're they're not making music for music's sake. They're they're just mass generating keywords, right? It's almost like a Google SEO scam. You're just dumping songs that you think people might be searching for. Or maybe let's say you have a a song that's like a love song to Andrew and then a love song to Amy and then a love song to Michelle. And then you do that for a thousand names, right? Because there's someone on there just going to on Spotify is going to type in love song Ryan, love song Ronaldo, right? Love song Bianca, right? Whatever it is. And if you have that keyword, you're going to get that song essentially, right? That's an example of what I could just imagine on the spot of an SEO hack, but also a mass upload hack. Duplicates would be like, let's say you you try to clone a song, like you try to make a clone of every single Sabrina Carpenter song with the same title. So you're hoping that someone will search for Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, and then they find this other song that's also called Sabre Espresso, but there's like 50 other ones that kind of sound like Espresso, but they're all called Espresso, or they're called something similar. uh that would be a duplicate thing. So these are just spam, right? It's not even necessarily about the AI. It's really about the spam. It just happens to be that it's way easier to do these spam upload things with AI music, right? Because you don't have to spend the time making it. Now, the third part about this, and again, we have this other article to go through that's actually, I think, even more interesting. The third part about this is the disclosure of AI generated content. So this this isn't a sexy topic, so I'll go over go over go over go over go over go over go over go over go over go over go over go over it kind of briefly but they're they're working they're trying to work on a standard to allow people to disclose different levels of AI generated content right so like be able to say we AI generated vocals we AI generated these instruments or post-production maybe we use AI mastering right this isn't just like all AI this is like how do you how do you make it public that like humans worked on this right we credit songwriters we credit producers but how do you make it just visibly public that hey we used AI mastering or we used AI drums but everything else is humanmade there there's different layers of that and this is kind of about looking to the future and thinking about like you know what are the different levels that people will use AI tools like actual artists use AI tools in their music and they're trying to come up with a standard and they're working with Drokid and CDV and Amuse and Downtown Empire and all these other people Fuga Soundrop to to figure out a standard for that. It's not here yet, but they're working on it. All right, that's the preface to this article, which again, this is the bigger update here. And actually, let me go back to this other article for a second because there's one thing I glossed over. One part of this was that in the last year, they've actually deleted 75 million spammy tracks. They they have actually been purging a lot of these spam tracks behind the scenes. And 75 million is probably not a huge number for Spotify. No one really knows how many songs they have, but um there's there's over 100,000 songs uploaded a day to the platform. So like this actually might be a very significant percentage of tracks that they completely removed because they're just trying to capitalize on all this spam. So going on to this, this article has actually been getting some controversy as well because people see this and they immediately go Spotify is making AI generated music, right? That's the immediate assumption that you get if you don't read this. Now, if you do read this, you're going to realize that the the hate is actually not warranted. There might be some things to be concerned about in this, but but bear with me for a sec as we walk through this in a reasonable fashion. They specifically are calling out artists and their teams feel like AI tools are really designed to compete with them rather than designed to help them, right? Platforms like Sunno, Udo, etc., They're they're not tools for artists. They're they're they kind of feel like tools that are anti-arts because they're one, they stole all the music in the world, used the train and algorithm that they're now selling and making millions of dollars. And now that other people can use that tool to essentially compete with the artists that originally made that music and there that's a separate issue, right? Like that's being fought in the courts right now. U they going to be shut down or they going to have to pay a bunch of money out who knows, right? That's that's a whole separate thing. There are other companies making AI generated music tools that are 100% permissionbased, meaning the artists opt in and the artists are paid for the use of their music. And so that's kind of like the ethical version of an AI training system is it's like everyone gave permission, everyone got paid. Sunno and Udo did not do that. They stole everything and now it's kind of like competing with artists. So Spotify behind the scenes have been working on some AI tools that are not that. For example, the AI DJ tool, the personalized playlist, AI playlist where you can type in a sentence and it'll generate a playlist for you. These are not AI music tools. They are just AI serving tools, right? They kind of they serve you music based on AI, which this that's whole Spotify's model. Like since Spotify has been a thing, they've used machine learning aka AI to learn how to recommend music in a very favorable way. So, they go on further to say that there's been a lot of people that saying copyright law just doesn't make sense in the future. They're saying they don't agree with that. Musicians rights matter. Copyright's essential. Uh we need to like respect who owns the music. And so part of that is they are trying to work with rights holds artist songwriters to make investments in AI research and product development. So they want to make products in the AI space as part of Spotify. And that's kind of where the fear comes from, right? Is Spotify making an AI music tool? And so this got me thinking like there's one way I could imagine an AI tool that allows artists to get more fans. Let's say hypothetically you had a a Taylor Swift song that you loved. You wanted to change the lyrics of it for fun and then share it with your friends, right? That would be a way to kind of deepen the artist fan connection if you could go and say, "Oh, get this Taylor Swift song, but change the lyrics to make it about my dog." So it still sounds like Taylor Swift and it's still her song, but now it's this generated version of it that Taylor Swift gets paid every time it's streamed. And now that person is sharing it with their friends and Taylor Swift can see it and then maybe that new version goes viral and Taylor Swift's making money off of it, right? And that's a controversial tool alone. A lot of artists might not like that, but again, if you if you opt into that, especially if you see like, oh wow, like this artist, this small artist with 100,000 monthly listeners, and I know that's not necessarily small for a lot of us, but 100,000 monthly listeners, not a huge artist, was able to allow people to remix their music with an AI tool, have a lot of fun, make social media content about it, and now this artist has like 5 million monthly listeners because of all that artist fan engagement and fan interaction with their music. And I don't know if this is what Spotify is I don't have insider information here, but imagine for a second that if fans don't just experience music, they get to touch music. They get to actually go in and tweak stuff and play with if they want and if the artists want to allow them to do it and then the artists get paid accordingly. But you can imagine how fun that would be from from a fan perspective if you could actually touch and manipulate the music that you love to have fun. Just like on social media, Tik Tok has kind of allowed anyone to be a content creator and anyone to remix stuff and repost stuff and kind of have some benefit and fun. Kind of like that, but for music with an AI tool. Again, have no idea that's what they're doing or not, but that's just one example off the top of my head that I thought of immediately. Now, they are talking about they're building a state-of-the-art generative research AI lab. So, we have independent players and major label players and Spotify working together to come up with tools that use AI, but to learn from AI and do do things the right way and come up with ways to actually enhance the artist fan relationship, not replace it. Spotify doesn't want everyone to hate them, I would assume. But anyways, let me know in the comments. Subscribe if you want to see more. And if you want to learn how to promote your music on platforms like Spotify or Apple Music, check out this video right here to see the entire process from start to finish. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.