Recent news out of AI-powered music creation app Boomy suggests the answer could well be “yes.”
In a statement made on its Discord server on Monday (May 1), Boomy said that Spotify had shut down its ability to upload songs to the DSP, and that some already-uploaded tracks had been removed.
“Very recently, Spotify stopped publishing new releases from Boomy. Additionally, certain catalog releases were removed from their platform,” the company said.
“This decision was made by Spotify and Boomy’s distributor in order to enable a review of potentially anomalous activity.”
UPDATE: A Spotify spokesperson has since confirmed to MBW that those “certain catalog releases” from Boomy were removed because the streaming platform detected artificial streaming of these tracks. Any streams for this content, confirmed Spotify, have been excluded from royalty calculations.
A Spotify spokesperson said:“Artificial streaming is a longstanding, industry-wide issue that Spotify is working to stamp out across our service.
“When we identify or are alerted to potential cases of stream manipulation, we mitigate their impact by taking action that may include the removal of streaming numbers and the withholding of royalties. This allows us to protect royalty payouts for honest, hardworking artists.”
“When we identify or are alerted to potential cases of stream manipulation, we mitigate their impact by taking action that may include the removal of streaming numbers and the withholding of royalties.”
Spotify spokesperson
In addition, sources suggest that despite Boomy’s claim that Spotify had “stopped publishing [our] new releases”, it is in fact Boomy’s distribution partner – Downtown-owned DashGo – which has halted the distribution of new Boomy tracks to digital services, in the wake of the “stream manipulation” described by Spotify above.
(There is no suggestion that Boomy itself is responsible for the “stream manipulation” in question. A Boomy spokesperson said: “Supporting artists and creators who use the Boomy platform is our top priority. Boomy is categorically against any type of manipulation or artificial streaming. We are working with industry partners to address this issue and restart the distribution of Boomy artist content on the Spotify platform.”)
According to Boomy’s website, since the AI startup was founded in the US in 2019, its users have created a whopping 14.4 million songs, which, the firm boasts, accounts for “around 13.78% of the world’s recorded music”.
For the time being at least, only a tiny fraction of these tracks have been deleted on Spotify, as noted by Music Ally.
From what MBW can see, two tracks out 54 tracks have been removed on the This Is Boomy playlist on Spotify, while on the Boomystars playlist for March 2023, four out of 24 tracks have been made unavailable.
Today’s news comes a week after Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify, announced to investors that his company was working with major record companies to quell the threat posed to ‘legitimate’ rightsholders by some elements of AI-produced music on streaming services.
Spotify
“[Spotify is] working with our partners on in trying to establish a position where we both allow innovation, but at the same time, protect all of the creators that we have on our platform.”
Daniel Ek, speaking in reference to AI music on April 25
Said Ek last Tuesday (April 25): “[T]he AI pushback from the copyright industry, or labels and media companies, is really [concerned with] issues like ‘name and likeness’, what is an actual copyright, who owns the right to something where you upload something and claim it to be Drake [when] it’s really not, and so on. Those are legitimate concerns.”
Ek then confirmed that “obviously, those are things [Spotify is] working with our partners on in trying to establish a position where we both allow innovation, but at the same time, protect all of the creators that we have on our platform”.
In recent months, music industry execs have become increasingly concerned about the large number of new tracks being uploaded to DSPs.
Many in the industry worry this deluge of new content could erode the presence of professional artists signed to major labels, while business leaders at some of the DSPs worry that low-quality content could damage the user experience.
Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira said during an earnings call on March 1: “There’s a lot of duplicated content, there’s a lot of content that is not even music… and at a certain point you get way too much content that is useless for the users. And it starts creating a bad user experience.”
Folgueira added that Deezer was “supportive of being stricter in terms of what we allow to get uploaded to the platform, and the quality of the catalog.”
“Any way you look at it, it’s over-supply. Whether or not AI creates [that over-supply], it’s simply bad, bad for artists, bad for fans, and bad for the platforms themselves.”
Sir Lucian Grainge, Universal Music Group
On UMG’s Q1 earnings call last month (April), Grainge said that AI-generated music had “already been a major contributor to this content oversupply.”
According to Grainge, “most of this AI content on DSPs comes from the prior generation of AI, a technology that is not trained on copyrighted IP and that produces very poor quality output with virtually no consumer appeal”.
He added: “However, the recent explosive development in generative AI will, if left unchecked, both increase the flood of unwanted content hosted on platforms and create rights issues with respect to existing copyright law in the US and other countries – as well as laws governing trademark, name and likeness, voice impersonation and the right of publicity.”
The fact that the new generation of AI technology is far more sophisticated than the “poor quality” AI music Grainge referred to can be seen in the recent explosion on social media of tracks that convincingly mimic famous artists’ vocals.
A track called heart on my sleeve, which featured an AI-generated Drake and The Weeknd on vocals, went viral on TikTok and racked up more than 15 million views on the platform – and hundreds of thousands more on other platforms – before DSPs and social media sites pulled the track down.
That’s just one of a rapidly growing number of examples; others include a fake Bad Bunny track that clocked 1.5 million views on TikTok, and a music snippet of a fake Rihanna performing Beyonce’s Cuff It.
“You have technologies out there in the market today that can detect an AI-generated track with 99.9% accuracy.”
“Unlike its predecessors, much of the latest generative AI is trained on copyrighted material, which clearly violates artists’ and labels’ rights and will put platforms completely at odds with the partnerships with us and our artists and the ones that drive success,” Grainge said during Universal’s earnings call last month.
“Should platforms traffic in this kind of music, they would face the additional responsibility of addressing a huge volume of infringing AI-generated content.
“Any way you look at it, it’s over-supply. Whether or not AI creates [that over-supply], it’s simply bad, bad for artists, bad for fans, and bad for the platforms themselves.”
The effort to address the problem highlighted by Grainge now appears to be in full swing.
During an earnings call last Thursday (April 27), Believe CEO Denis Ladegaillerie said the music company is committed to blocking AI-created music from being uploaded to DSPs via its distribution platform, TuneCore.
“You have technologies out there in the market today that can detect an AI-generated track with 99.9% accuracy, versus a human-created track,” Ladegaillerie said.
“Something … we feel very good [about] is the fact that the ability to control [AI uploads] is there. Now it needs to be deployed everywhere.”
Ladegaillerie added that Believe is just one or two quarters away from deploying the technology on its own distribution networks.
“Something … we feel very good [about] is the fact that the ability to control [AI uploads] is there. Now it needs to be deployed everywhere.”
Denis Ladegaillerie, Believe
At the same time, Ladegaillerie sees potential in AI to be used to monetize AI-generated tracks – by detecting which tracks were created by AI, and which artists, in which proportions, were borrowed from.
“What we are doing now, we are experimenting with a few of the large global AI companies around attribution… If a track is being created tomorrow that uses music from several artists, if we want to be able to license that track [to someone using it to create a new recording], for the original artist to be compensated, we need to know what percentage of the new song that has been created is attributable to this artist or that artist.
“And so we are doing a number of experiments to see how reliable attribution models are, so that we can move them potentially to licensing and generate a revenue opportunity for the artist.”
Meanwhile, major media companies are themselves moving into the AI-music creation space. Tencent Music Entertainment said last fall that it had created some 1,000 music tracks using generative AI, and one of those tracks had already racked up more than 100 million streams.
TikTok parent company ByteDance is currently hiring a Product Manager to join a team that is “working on an AI-powered tool that provides intelligent music creation and audio editing capabilities.”
And TikTok itself is hiring a “Music Creator Operations Manager” in a department that “develop[s] music production tools and AI-generated music compositions.”Music Business Worldwide
