The Spotfiy problem: Does AI listen to music made by AI?

The conflict with Boomy was soon settled and since then the topic seems to have disappeared from sight. Behind the scenes, however, things are close to boiling over. Insiders estimate that the share of non-human streams is currently around 7%, which would correspond to many billions of artificial listening sessions. Payouts/royalties are calculated on the basis of income from sold subscriptions and advertising and distributed to the artists and labels by means of a weighted key. But should AI tools flood streaming platforms with songs that are then continuously streamed 24 hours a day by virtual profiles, royalties per stream are bound to plummet and the market would quickly distort beyond control.

It goes without saying that this situation is unacceptable for labels. After spending many anxious years in the 90s conjuring up apocalyptic scenarios about the end of the music industry, downloads and streams were welcomed as a godsend. By buying into these formats, the majors ultimately increased their control over the market compared to the time of physical formats. AI was not a threat to them for a long time, but rather another building block of this control strategy: Bots are used to monitor YouTube videos for the use of copyrighted works and to collect royalties; artificial intelligence supports hit producers in their work and reduces costs for human experts; finally, AI is to become a central point in the majors‘ own product and artist range in the long term. Will the streaming model, often criticised for its inhumanity, now be brought down by the very ghosts it conjured?

Is the streaming model, often criticised for its inhumanity, now being brought down by the ghosts it has conjured up?

AI music and AI listeners are only part of the problem. Another is the proliferation of profiles that specialise in providing wellness sounds, background noise and functional music: Sounds to help babies rest, students study, and productive members of society focus on their tasks. What sounds like real-life satire has in fact turned into a lucrative business model. Countless apps, websites and CDs promise better sleep, inner peace and higher health. Now these offers are spilling over onto streaming platforms.

And they‘re doing so in a big way. The one and a half minutes of gently rolling ocean waves of the Spotify profile „White Noise Therapy“ have generated almost 200 million streams in just one and a half years – as many as some tracks on the new Taylor Swift album. The „Granular“ channel has white noise tracks on offer at both 500hz and 145hz. Together they have been listened to over a billion times. Instead of cracking down on them, Spotify is trying to integrate the providers into its own cosmos as organically as possible. There are even radio channels with functional sounds and playlists with the best „brown noise“ tracks for optimised focus. For independent musicians, however, this hardly makes the situation any better. Not only do they face competition from the majors, whose budgets exceed theirs many times over, but now they also have to share their vanishingly small income with pieces that are not even intended as music.

Countermeasures

Since the pressure on streaming providers and labels alike is growing, it is not surprising that the first countermeasures have already been initiated. French company Deezer is one of the leaders in this regard. In direct cooperation with record labels, they have made various adjustments to the business model that are intended to ward off bots, unbridled AI and functional music. The sounds of spinning washing machines and gentle noise channels have been demonetised and Deezer now provides its own targeted offerings in this direction.

The change in the payout model in favour of „professional artists“ is much more far-reaching. From now on, Deezer will only pay musicians who generate more than 1,000 streams from 500 different listeners per month – everything below this threshold is no longer considered relevant. If users specifically search for a song via the search function and then play it, Deezer will count these streams as two. The model sounds harsh, but the idea behind it is rather to put artists back in the spotlight – admittedly on the backs of all those who cannot keep up with these minimum requirements. The next logical step would then be to calculate royalties only on the basis of streams from paying customer profiles and to pay artists only for the songs for which there were actual listeners.

Equal rights for AI

While the labels, led by market leader Universal, are ramping up their fight against the threat to their revenue stream, virtual technology providers see themselves as champions of the rights of all those who have so far been shortchanged in the streaming age. Boomy seems to want to bring about a complete democratisation of the means of production. If major labels monopolise access to elite studios, hit producers and distribution channels, the reasoning goes, independent artists may have no choice but to let artificial intelligence do the work for them. Admittedly, most of the loops and fragments produced by Boomy sound rather unusable. But it requires little effort to imagine how much closer to the human product the same offer will be in a few years – especially when it comes to ambient atmospheres and beats.

Even if the industry manages to successfully arm itself against listening bots and the glut of AI-generated compositions, the wave seems almost unstoppable. Another technology service, Musixy, for example, specialises in calculating cover versions in which the AI imitates the voices of well-known artists. Users can request new versions or even have their own songs created by the proprietary AI in which well-known superstars serenade them. So if you‘ve always wanted to know how Lana del Rey would sound crooning „Reign in Blood“ by Slayer, or how Michael Jackson would have faired as an interpreter of „Bob the Builder“, you‘ll find it here. Founder Can Ansay sees himself as the saviour of the industry and thinks he has armed himself as a lawyer against any lawsuit from the major. His ambitions are nothing less than gigantic – he is already talking about helping an AI-written song win the Grammy Awards. Should that come to pass, the industry would finally have arrived at a point of no return.

Streaming critics will hardly be able to stifle their schadenfreude, but there is desperately little fun to be had here. If the streaming model does indeed collapse, the industry will once again face a black hole – and the careers of many artists will be in shambles.