Photo: Daniel Ek | By Zoe Kleinman, BBC | The boss of Spotify says he has no plans to completely ban content created by artificial intelligence from the music streaming platform. Earlier this year the platform pulled a track featuring AI-cloned voices of the performers Drake and The Weeknd.
Daniel Ek told the BBC there were valid uses of the tech in making music – but AI should not be used to impersonate human artists without their consent.
He said using AI in music was likely to be debated for “many, many years”.
Mr Ek, who rarely speaks to the media, said that he saw three “buckets” of AI use:
● tools such as auto-tune which improve music, which he believed were acceptable
● tools which mimic artists, which were not
● and a more contentious middle ground where music created by AI was clearly influenced by existing artists but did not directly impersonate them.
“It is going to be tricky,” he said when asked about the challenge the industry was facing.
While AI is not banned in all forms on the platform the company does not allow its content to be used to train a machine learning or AI model, the likes of which can then produce music.
Artists are increasingly speaking out against the use of AI in the creative industries.
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Mr Ek has long been a vocal critic of the policies of Apple and Google’s app stores, on which Spotify relies. Both companies charge smaller developers a 15% commission on in-app purchases, with this rising to 30% for developers with revenue of more than $1m.
Spotify has also complained that Apple makes it hard for the business to communicate directly with its customers and promote its services elsewhere.
“We are in a situation where literally two companies in the world control how over four billion consumers access the internet,” said Mr Ek.
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Read the full important article here:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66882414
[Thanks to Alex Teitz for contributing this article! http://www.femmusic.com]
September 28, 2023| Colorado Music-Related Business| Barb Dye