yes a song is created by artificial intelligence and heard by a bot, was it heard at all? It’s a problem music streaming companies are now facing, as generative AI is quickly making it easy for anyone to mass-produce songs with a few clicks and then send bots to stream them for cash.
“It’s a gate,” says Tony Rigg, professor of music industry management at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. He’s talking about the coming of AI-generated music. And that torrent of new music amplifies the problem of fake listening, giving people a simple way to get streams on low-quality tracks.
Artificial transmission, or bot listening, is not new. Some turn to third-party companies that promise to boost streaming, who then recruit bot-created accounts to listen to the same playlists repeatedly. It’s a problem because streaming companies split up royalty payments from a limited pool of cash: the more a song is played, the more its creator earns. Therefore, more money for songs that bots listen to may mean less is sent to those with human fans. Human artists have already been caught up in artificial transmission scandalsbut AI is adding a new element.
The first major test case came last week when Spotify reportedly removed tens of thousands of songs created and uploaded to Spotify by music generator AI Boomy. These made up a small percentage of Boomy’s total creations, but included songs suspected of being transmitted by bots, according to the financial times. Spotify did not respond to a request for comment to confirm the removal, but the platform has policies against false transmission.
Boomy’s uploads to Spotify stopped last week, but resumed May 6th. Alex Mitchell, CEO and founder of Boomy, says the company is “categorically against any kind of artificial manipulation or transmission.” Mitchell also says that Boomy has a system in place to respond to suspicious streaming notices sent out by streaming companies, and can move to freeze payments and block users who may be manipulating the system for profit. But tons of artificial listeners were still able to communicate before getting caught, which goes to show just how prolific these scams have become.
The false transmission is an industry-wide problem that goes beyond AI-made music. TO study of the Center National de la Musique de France, a public-private organization focused on the French music industry, found that between 1 and 3 percent of all music streamed on various popular platforms in France in 2021 was detected by bots. , representing an estimated 1 to 3 billion fake flows.
Competition for listeners is fierce. There are more than 100 million songs on apple music, amazon musicand Spotify, and many are rarely, if ever, played. With the rapid advances in generative AI, a deluge of new songs They are expected to hit streaming platforms.
And, as with so much in generative AI, it’s happening fast. Last month, a song that faked the voices of drake and the weeknd it went viral and was yanked from Spotify. As technology becomes more convincing, impersonations are fooling more and more people. The scammers allegedly used AI to generate new leads with Frank Ocean’s voiceand sold them to his fans for thousands of dollars, luring people in with the promise of leaking songs.
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