By Narayan Saimbi
On 25 September, Spotify announced its crackdown on the use of AI on its streaming platform, stating that it had removed 75 million tracks that utilised generative AI. The company stated that the use of generative AI to push “slop” onto its platform is both damaging to artists and “degrades the user experience”.
Alongside this statement, Spotify laid out a plethora of new changes, all with the aim of combatting the “harmful” use of generative AI on the platform. These included a “new impersonation policy”, support for an industry-wide AI disclosure standard and a “music spam filter”. These changes are meant to combat the use of AI-generated voices, standardize transparency over the use of AI and prevent the prevalence of AI “slop” on the platform respectively.
But what does any of this mean and is it a welcome change? Whilst the Swedish streaming giant has been in hot water recently over its choice of investments, these changes seem to have answered previous concerns over the use of AI on the streaming platform.
However, not all artists are welcome to this change. Damion ‘Damizza’ Young expressed concerns over the potential “arbitrary” nature of this policy and worried that independent artists could be targets of the impersonation policy over matters such as “style or influence”. There have also been concerns over the contradiction of Spotify’s message of fairly paying artists– the $15 billion company famously only pays its artists between $0.003-$0.005 per stream . Whilst these changes appear to be a step in the right direction, there seems to be a consensus that the company has a long way to go to fix all the issues with its platform, AI-generated or not.
These changes are, of course, incredibly recent. Only time will tell if these changes are implemented well, or if artists are still going to be struggling to generate royalties, against AI-generated “slop” or otherwise.
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