Spotify has more than 626 million users worldwide, but some of these listeners might be unknowingly jamming out to music by "fake" artists. The world's top music streaming platform has reportedly become inundated with unlicensed covers of songs, many generated by artificial intelligence.
What are these 'fake artists'? "Covers of popular songs were being inserted into large, publicly available playlists, hidden among dozens of other covers by real artists while racking up millions of listens and getting paid," said Slate. The artists in question "all fit a certain pattern, with monthly listeners in the hundreds of thousands, zero social media footprint, and some very ChatGPT-sounding bios."
The issue exists across genres. A group of Redditors first found the AI songs in country music, but there's also a "broader, coordinated effort by individuals using AI to create and distribute instrumental music that mimics well-known metalcore bands," music site Idioteq said. While it cannot be confirmed that all of these songs are the result of AI, many "appear to be similar versions of the same piece of poorly produced music, each differentiated by random changes in pitch," said gaming and tech site Kotaku.
What does Spotify say? Spotify "does not have a policy against artists creating content using autotune or AI tools, as long as the content does not violate our other policies, including our deceptive content policy, which prohibits impersonation," the company said in a statement to Slate. So stopping the uploading of more of these songs presents a challenge.
"I don't know how you legislate any of this stuff," Rick Beato, a musician, producer and YouTuber who has previously testified about AI copyright in music, said to Slate. Spotify may also be "slipping both real and AI songs into playlists and harvesting listens to keep a larger percentage of the royalty pool for itself to maximize profits," so there "would really be an incentive for Spotify to police that from third parties, because they want to be the ones doing it." |