A few months ago, French DJ David Guetta released a video that probably gave some artists and music executives the creeps. “There’s something I did as a joke and it worked so well I couldn’t believe it!” marveled Guetta.
In the clip, Guetta is DJing a set for thousands of fans in a dark club. He plays a song that seems to sample rapper Eminem, whose signature voice delights the crowd.
“Eminem, bro!” Guetta says. Only it wasn’t actually Eminem. Instead, Guetta had used a artificial intelligence site to generate lyrics in Eminem’s style and then fed that text into another AI site which recreated the sound of Eminem’s voice. The result: “I played the record and people went crazy.”
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The use of AI to produce music has made the industry increasingly alarmed in recent months, with insiders likening the outage to that of sharing site Napster in the early 2000s.
The barrier to entry to making music had already been much lower than, say, making a film. Artists can produce songs from their bedrooms. But artificial intelligence has opened the door even further. It’s never been easier to create a song and add it to Spotify. One such site that allows it, called Boomy, claims that its users have generated more than 14 million songs. By comparison: Spotify’s entire catalog is around 100 million songs.
Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Music, sounded the alarm. “The runaway generative AI poses many dangers,” he told investors last month. Universal Music recently sent a letter to all major streaming platforms warning them not to allow AI technology to train on copyrighted music, Financial Times reports reported last month.
There are a few reasons for such concerns. The first is obvious: copyright infringement. A fake Drake generated by artificial intelligence can only sound like the star because she learned to do so by listening to Drake. So the music companies argue that Drake should get some of the money these songs make. some musicians, like Grimes, however, are happy to join and allow their entries to be duplicated, splitting the royalty income 50/50. The copyright issue may take some time to sort out, but eventually music companies and other stakeholders will create a framework for how to license music used by AI generators.
But there’s another reason Universal is concerned. The market share of major label music on streaming platforms is declining, slowly but steadily. In 2017, the four biggest providers accounted for 87% of all listens on Spotify. By 2022, it was reduced to 75 percent.
Listening is increasingly being diverted towards the music of independent artists, as well as ambient tracks and songs generated by artificial intelligence. Grainge has spent the last few months talking about an “oversupply” of content on Spotify, where 100,000 new songs are added every day. She says artificial intelligence has been a major contributor to this.
The big music companies worry because they earn billions of dollars in royalty income that is directly tied to their stream rate. But this shift is also fundamentally changing what Spotify is and raising big questions about how we’ll consume music in the future.
For a long time, Spotify had been pitted against Netflix. It was where you could pay a monthly subscription to access a huge catalog of professionally produced music. But Spotify is turning into more than a combination of Netflix and YouTube, a platform where you can listen to megastars, but also 30-second clips of rain that can be created in seconds by anyone with access to a computer.
Artificial intelligence has helped spur this change. A senior music executive described AI-generated music to me as “UGC on steroids,” referring to “user-generated content” — the homemade clips of cats, memes, covers of popular songs, etc., that dominate YouTube.
Grainge and his colleagues, such as Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl, are talking about developing an economic model for streaming. “It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same. . .[as]a stream of rain falling on the roof,” Kyncl said recently.
What could this model look like? Perhaps all user-generated music will be ported entirely to a different platform, while professional music will be reserved for premium services. Spotify may be reluctant to accept this. But another change in the sector is looming. “The music industry disruption has only had one chapter,” says Mark Mulligan, an analyst at consulting firm Midia. “There’s more to come.”
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