Spotify: Here’s what made Spotify remove thousands of AI-made songs – Times of India

Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining popularity. From creating articles and images to songs, generative AI has seen increased usage online. Recently, the music industry witnessed an uproar as AI bots use songs to train themselves and churn out music that pretty much sounds like it is coming from popular artists. These AI-generated songs have popped up on various streaming platforms like Spotify. The Swedish company is removing tens of thousands of AI-generated songs from the platform.
According to a report by The Financial Times, Spotify has removed 7% of songs created by the AI music startup Boomy. This percentage amounts to “tens of thousands” of songs and the company is also ramping up efforts to keep such incidents in check.
“Artificial streaming is a longstanding, industry-wide issue that Spotify is working to stamp out across our service,” the company was quoted as saying. The AI songs were removed due to the suspected “artificial streaming” of bots posing as listeners.

Crackdown started in April
On May 1, Boomy in a statement on its Discord server Boomy said that Spotify had shut down its ability to upload songs to the DSP and that some already-uploaded tracks had been removed, as per a report by publication Music Business Worldwide.
“Very recently, Spotify stopped publishing new releases from Boomy. Additionally, certain catalogue releases were removed from their platform. This decision was made by Spotify and Boomy’s distributor in order to enable a review of potentially anomalous activity,” the company was quoted as saying.
According to Spotify, the removal of AI-generated songs allows the company “to protect royalty payouts for honest, hardworking artists.”

“When we identify or are alerted to potential cases of stream manipulation, we mitigate their impact by taking action that may include the removal of streaming numbers and the withholding of royalties,” the music streaming company was quoted as saying.
AI “poses significant issues”
According to a previous report by The Financial Times, Universal Music Group (UMG) told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block AI services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs.
“We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists,” the report said, citing emails sent by the company.

“This next generation of technology poses significant issues. Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say: compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists’ intellectual property,” a person close to the situation was cited as saying.
Earlier this year, AI-generated video clips surfaced on social media wherein several artists were seen singing cover versions of songs by other artists. This led major record labels to go after AI-generated songs.