The fight against AI-generated songs, artist impersonation, AI-generated artists, and human artist protection has been discussed, with more music platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music joining in and making major policy changes. Spotify just announced some major changes and new features to help in the fight against AI-generated songs, their distribution, fans’ deception, and more.
Many AI tracks have amassed millions of views either as covers, remixes, or fabricated content of popular artists. Grammy-winning artist Taylor Swift has several AI covers of her songs, including The Fate of Ophelia. It was reported that an AI cover of ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ entered the Top 50 of the Brazilian Spotify chart with 433k streams, along with other AI variants like the ‘Afro Beats version’, which garnered 15M views on YouTube.
Apple Music was one of the first streaming platforms to take a major step early this year in taking artist protection against AI-generated songs and artists to another level, and Spotify is set to also make major changes. Henceforth, distributors will have to provide more information about the music before they can upload to streaming platforms.
These top music platforms, Spotify and Apple Music, are revealing they are going to demand song tags be add-ons to help identify AI-generated songs or artists. Apple Music has created a new “transparency tag”, while Spotify is adding features like SongDNA, AI credits, and artist profile protection.
Here are the three problems these solutions would be addressing and how real human artists stand to benefit from these new features.
- Identity Fraud:
Music lovers cannot distinguish between human and AI artists. A lot of AI-generated music is not identified as such, and fans fall in love with it and discover the songs are not by real artists.
Solution – AI-Generated Artist Identities:
The “AI Persona” badge is a new trick that Spotify will be adding. It will identify AI content, and songs from such a profile would not appear on listeners’ playlists organically unless the listener searches for the songs. These songs would not be suggested by the algorithm or included in recommended tracks.
- Music Deception:
Music platforms are designed to suggest tracks based on a listener’s habits, such as genre, artists, or songs. However, there is no protection against AI-generated tracks, and these tracks can get recommended into a listener’s playlist without intentional consent or warning. Some fans get disappointed when they discover a new track and discover the artist does not exist, but the track was AI-generated. This leads to the question of consumer protection and policies around AI-generated music.
Solution – Transparency Tags:
The introduction of transparency tags seeks to help with consumer confusion. Due to a lack of metadata, these AI-generated tracks are generic. With transparency tags, the information about each track would reveal what part used AI to produce the song rather than the “AI label”, which only stated if AI was used.
The transparency tag will include the album artwork, the music video, the music composition, and the song itself. Apple added in a statement that the tags would be the “first step in giving the music industry the data and tools needed to develop thoughtful policies around AI.”
- Artist Imitations and Financial Loss:
Another issue is the impersonation of human artists by AI. The number of AI-generated songs impersonating real human artists is on the rise. These songs use the voices of human artists blended with other sounds to create new tracks. A sample case was that of British artist Emily Portman, who discovered through a message from fans praising her new album—an album she didn’t record or release.
Another case was that of Grammy-nominated Australian band member Paul Bender, where the band’s music profile, Hiatus Kaiyote, added four AI-generated songs. Although these songs were easily added to the profiles without consent from the band, it took a legal process of eight weeks before the sounds could be removed. A process that included 24,000 people signing a petition Bender launched on change.org, including singer-songwriter Anderson .Paak and singer Willow Smith.
Solution – No royalties or financial benefits:
Music royalties are payments made to songwriters, recording artists, and rights holders whenever their music is played, streamed, performed, or used commercially. Money is collected from platforms or businesses and split based on two distinct copyrights: the composition (lyrics and melody) and the master recording (the actual audio file)
Artists collect royalty payments from music platforms whenever their content is played or used commercially. Tidal is making sure AI-generated content does not overshadow human artists by cancelling these songs from being able to rank on global hit charts.
In addition, music that has the AI-generated music tag will get no financial benefit, making it not lucrative for the creators.
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