Spotify blocks thousands of songs made with artificial intelligence

The music and recording industry is also dealing with the advances in artificial intelligence. In fact, there are numerous digital software which, starting from predefined models, allow today to create unpublished songs, in fact indistinguishable from those created by a human mind: the most famous is perhaps boomy, a web page accessible by anyone. A reality that worries not only those who write the songs, but also the music industry as a whole: before being an extraordinary creative possibility, AI represents a threat to the existing market in the eyes of major stakeholders.

For all these reasons, Spotify – the largest music streaming platform – has decided to ban thousands of songs made with Boomy. The extent of the intervention is all in the number of songs involved: Boomy, according to its own data, has so far been used for uploading about 15 million pieces on streaming platforms. Spotify just eliminated the 7 percent.

As mentioned, there is above all an economic concern behind it. In recent weeks, the push for elimination has been the Universal Music Group, one of the largest record companies in the world. The CEO took care of raising the alarm directly, Lucien Grainge: “The recent explosive development of generative AI, if left unchecked, will increase the tide of unwanted content on platforms and it will create rights issues in relation to copyright law”. Specifically, the issue concerns the listening figures of the songs generated with Boomy: they would have been inflated by thousands of fictitious accounts, ending up distorting the general rankings and therefore the relative revenues from copyrights. Hence the request for intervention, accepted by Spotify.

But the search for a balance is also a priority for the Swedish platform, which finds itself having to manage a flow of songs that has never been so high: we talk more about 100 thousand new songs added per day. And the first to be amazed – and, in part, alarmed – is the founder and current top of Spotify, Daniel Ekwho would reveal to his analysts: “I’ve never seen such a thing in technology.”