​Spotify will not ban AI-generated music, CEO confirms

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has confirmed in an interview with the BBC that songs made using AI will not be banned from the streaming platform.

It follows recent discussions around fair use of AI-made music, particularly after the explosion of a track cloning the voices of The Weeknd and Drake, ‘Heart On My Sleeve’, which garnered millions of streams after its release.

The Spotify boss said that he expects problems around AI and music to persist for “many many years to come”, but the streaming giant will not make efforts to ban music made using artificial intelligence just yet.

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"It is going to be tricky,” he told the BBC. “You can imagine someone uploading a song, claiming to be Madonna, even if they're not.

“We've seen pretty much everything in the history of Spotify at this point with people trying to game our system,” he added. "We have a very large team that is working on exactly these types of issues."

Ek went on to explain that there are “valid” uses of tech when making music, but impersonating artists using AI should not be done without consent. He listed three roles in the use of AI: auto-tune, gathering inspiration from artists, and mimicking artists, the latter of which he claims is not acceptable.

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Despite his pledge not to ban AI-generated music, Ek added that Spotify does not allow its content to be used in the training of machine learning or AI to produce music.

Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported that Spotify had taken down thousands of AI-generated songs after it was suspected that bots were being used to inflate their number of streams.

In 2021, Daniel Ek was criticised for investing €100 million into AI defence company Helsing, which plans to use artificial intelligence to support militaries in battlefield assessment operations.

[Via: BBC]

Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Assistant Editor, follow her on Twitter