Music Ownership: Defending Against AI Playlists

I’m old enough⁤ to remember a time before Spotify ⁤ heralded the golden age of music discovery. Even the early beta ⁢catalog gave me access to far more music than I could ever hope to fit on⁣ my iPod Nano, and, more importantly, made⁢ discovering new artists and exploring new genres unbelievably easy. Many of us probably owe a huge ⁤debt to streaming platforms for shaping our musical tastes and expanding our libraries.

While the music streaming space has grown with both bigger libraries and a variety of new players, many of today’s top streaming‍ platforms are quickly morphing into the very antithesis of the formula that made them such a game-changer. Unsurprisingly, it’s driven by that most modern of ⁣problems: AI slop.

I was not the least bit ⁣surprised to read this week’s report that YouTube Music is serving up AI-generated⁤ spam – to Premium subscribers no less. For better or worse (definitely worse), AI-generated music is here to‍ stay, but the issue reminds⁣ me of⁣ Spotify’s “fake-artist” controversy,where it was claimed the company commissions music ⁢to stuff⁣ into their ⁣curated‍ playlists,essentially supplanting⁣ real musicians with cheaper,stock music.