Spotify’s head, Daniel Ek, has indicated he has no intention to fully prohibit AI-generated content on the music streaming platform he said in a recent BBC interview. Previously this year, a track which utilized AI to clone the voices of performers Drake and The Weeknd was removed from the platform.
Founded in 2006 by Ek and Martin Lorentzon, Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming provider boasting over 551 million monthly active users, including 220 million paying subscribers as of June 2023. The platform, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, offers a vast library of over 100 million songs and five million podcasts. With a freemium model, Spotify provides basic services for free, while premium subscriptions offer features like offline and ad-free listening. Available in 184 markets globally, except mainland China, Spotify pays royalties to rights holders based on the number of artist streams, distributing about 70% of its total revenue to them.
Ek said that while the technology has legitimate applications in music creation, it shouldn’t be employed to mimic human artists without their approval and mentioned the fact that the use of AI in music was likely to spark discussion for “many, many years”.
Trio of Buckets
In the interview conducted by the BBC’s technology editor, Zoe Kleinman, Ek, who seldom interacts with the media, identified three “buckets” of AI utilization:
- tools such as auto-tune which improve music, which he believed were acceptable
- tools which mimic artists, which were not
- and a more contentious middle ground where music created by AI was clearly influenced by existing artists but did not directly impersonate them.
“It is going to be tricky,” he said when asked about the challenges the music industry faces as to AI.
“Game the System”
“You can imagine someone uploading a song, claiming to be Madonna, even if they’re not. We’ve seen pretty much everything in the history of Spotify at this point with people trying to game our system,” Ek continued. “We have a very large team that is working on exactly these types of issues.”
Additionally, Ek touched on the platform’s substantial investment in podcasts, highlighting those from notable personalities such as Michelle and Barack Obama, alongside the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. None of these have been re-commissioned.
“The truth of the matter is some of it has worked, some of it hasn’t,” said Ek.
The agreement with Harry and Meghan, which reportedly amounted to $25m (£18m), resulted in the delivery of merely 12 episodes over a span of two and a half years. Recently, a Spotify executive was reported to have made negative remarks regarding the couple’s work ethic.
Ek was in the UK to engage in discussions regarding regulation. He expressed the company’s backing for the forthcoming Online Safety Bill, aimed at enhancing internet safety for children, as well as the ongoing Digital Markets and Competition Bill, intended to foster better competition by meticulously examining the tech giants.
Featured image: Credit: BBC
