Spotify is now taking up the fight against AI-generated music.
They have cleaned out thousands of songs posted through the website Boomy. On Boomy, users can let AI create their very own new song, which is then released on music services.
– The definition of an artist is probably about to change a bit. When everyone can create music with a few button presses, what is an artist? says Daniel Johansson, music researcher at Linnaeus University.
It was after a tip from Universal Music that Spotify cleaned up its catalog according to the Financial Times. Universal Music suspects that Boomy’s songs benefited from “artificial streaming”, meaning that bots drive up the number of plays and thereby the amount of money paid to the copyright holder.
14 million songs
Spotify says in a comment to TV4 that it continuously removes content that has the purpose of manipulating the system in order to generate royalties. This concerns, for example, unnatural or manipulated works.
Boomy is a website that lets people create their own music with the help of AI. By choosing a genre, for example “rap beats” or “electronic dance”, and then setting a few simple controls such as tempo and instruments, a new song is generated in just a few minutes.
When a user has created at least five songs, they can make a so-called release, where the songs are released to a number of streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music. This makes it possible to produce huge amounts of music in a short time. Boomy was launched two years ago and according to Boomy themselves, during that time users have generated 14 million songs.
– The strength of AI is that it becomes much more efficient. It will be more efficient, faster, safer. But today there are also flaws in AI. There isn’t this human factor that makes you think a song is good. These “blue” tones or whatever you call them are missing, says Daniel Johansson, music researcher at Linnaeus University.
Copyright infringement
Fake listens are not the only problem Universal Music raised. Spotify has previously been asked to weed out AI-generated music following reports that some AI may have been trained on copyrighted music. Earlier this year, a song that at first appeared to be a collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd went viral. The song was later removed from streaming services after it was revealed that the song was created by AI without input from the artists themselves.
– I think the rights holders can do as they did when file sharing came. Try to manage the intrusions that occur. There are actors today who have trained AI on copyrighted material and make money from it without sharing it with either the artist or the record company. The industry needs to crack down on these kinds of actors, says Daniel Johansson.