Can Spotify Regulate Misleading AI-Generated Music?

For artists unaffiliated with a record label or publishing house, online services can provide a leg up and a means to get one’s work in front of a potentially vast audience. That’s the good news; the bad news is that it’s also made it easier for unethical people to use the same services to flood potential listeners or readers with, for lack of a better phrase, slop made using AI.

This has become a growing concern in the book world, and it’s also present in the music industry. Futurism’s Victor Tangermann recently reported that the Spotify page for Volcano Choir, a project featuring Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, features a “new” song that was almost certainly created by AI and not any of the actual members of Volcano Choir. As the service itself recently acknowledged, this was symptomatic of a much larger issue.

This week, Spotify announced a shift in its policy when it comes to generative AI and music. “[W]e believe that aggressively protecting against the worst parts of Gen AI is essential to enabling its potential for artists and producers,” the company said in its statement. It also noted that it has removed 75 million “spammy tracks” from the service in the last year.

Among the steps Spotify is implementing are stronger restrictions addressing voice impersonation, including “testing new prevention tactics with leading artist distributors.” Spotify also plans to support AI disclosure and “a new music spam filter” that they believe will help identify bad actors who repeatedly upload illicit AI-generated music.

At least part of this announcement brings suggests Spotify is following the lead of some of its competitors. You may recall the controversy surrounding the Velvet Sundown, a psych-rock band that turned out to be wholly AI-generated, from this summer. Among the reasons that origins of their music raised some eyebrows was because some streaming platforms did flag it as AI-generated, including Deezer.

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One of the more interesting developments with respect to the AI disclosure standards is Spotify’s assertion that they are working with music industry organization DDEX to create “the new industry standard for AI disclosures in music credits.” What that will look like in practice remains to be seen; however, Stereogum just reported that the fake Volcano Choir song has been removed from the platform.

Meet your guide

Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…