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08-09-2024TECH

Spotify is full of AI music, and some say it's ruining the platform

Bands like Jet Fuel & Ginger Ales are raising eyebrows--and racking up
streams.

Spotify is full of AI music, and some say it's ruining the platform

[Images: romas_ph/Adobe Stock; pingebat/Adobe Stock]

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BY Chris Stokel-Walker3 minute read

Artists have long criticized Spotify for its meager royalties system
and its questionable content moderation practices. Now artists must
contend with an entirely different problem: increased competition
from AI-generated tracks, some of which have gained hundreds of
thousands of listens.

"There are multiple reports of [AI-generated music] being recommended
to people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of plays, or more,"
says Ed Newton-Rex, former vice president of audio at Stability AI,
who left the company in November 2023 over concerns about its
approach to copyright. Newton-Rex is now CEO of Fairly Trained, a
nonprofit that certifies artificial intelligence companies for fairer
training data sourcing.

Among those alleged AI-generated bands--believed to be inhuman in part
because they appear not to have any other online presence outside
Spotify--is Jet Fuel & Ginger Ales. The band has earned the "Verified
Artist" badge on Spotify and boasts 414,500 monthly listeners for its
covers of The La's and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yet Redditors are
convinced that the band is AI-generated.

It's not the only band believed to be AI-powered. Groups like Awake
Past 3 and Gutter Grinders have hundreds of thousands of monthly
listeners on the app, and often share some suspicious traits: the
uncanny valley vocals, the plain-Jane branding of their logo, and a
dearth of biographical information.

One singer, Sofia Pitcher, managed to rack up huge streaming numbers
between December 2023 and March 2024 for tracks like "Stone Age" and
"Rock," both of which came from her album, Stone Age. But Pitcher
didn't exist, according to an investigation by Spanish news outlet El
Diario.

Spotify did not provide answers to a request for comment by the
deadline provided, which included clarifying whether Pitcher, Jet
Fuel & Ginger Ales, and Awake Past 3 are, in fact, AI-generated
musicians. (Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in a rare BBC interview in
September 2023 that the app has no plans to ban AI music.)

A Spotify spokesperson did say that the streaming giant "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 has in the past taken action against
alleged AI-generated artists (Pitcher's tracks are no longer
streamable). The Spotify spokesperson did not provide data to Fast
Company on how many AI artists are on the platform, or their impact
on streams.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Stokel-Walker is a contributing writer at Fast Company who
focuses on the tech sector and its impact on our daily lives--online
and offline. He has explored how the WordPress drama has implications
for the wider web, how AI web crawlers are pushing sites offline, as
well as stories about ordinary people doing incredible things, such
as the German teen who set up a MySpace clone with more than a
million users. More

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