A few months ago, French DJ David Guetta posted a video that probably sent chills down the spines of some artists and music executives. “I made one as a joke and it worked incredibly well!” Guetta marveled.
In this clip, Guetta DJs a set to thousands of fans in a darkened club. He performed a song that sounded like he sampled rapper Eminem and delighted the audience with his unique voice.
“Eminem, brother!” says Guetta. However, it wasn’t really Eminem. Instead, Guetta used an artificial intelligence site to generate lyrics in Eminem’s style, and then input the text into another of his AI sites to recreate the sound of Eminem’s voice. The result was, “Everyone went crazy when I put the record on.”
The industry has become increasingly wary of the use of AI in music production in recent months, with officials likening the turmoil to the turmoil of sharing site Napster in the early 2000s.
The barriers to entry for music production were much lower than for film production, for example. Artists can produce songs from their bedrooms. But AI has opened the floodgates even further. Creating music and adding it to Spotify has never been easier. Boomy, one of his one of the sites that allows this, says its users have generated over 14 million songs for her. By comparison, Spotify’s entire catalog is about 100 million songs.
Universal Music CEO Lucien Grainge warned. “Unchecked generative AI poses a lot of danger,” he told investors last month. Universal Music recently sent a letter to all major streaming platforms warning them not to allow their AI technology to learn copyrighted music, the Financial Times reported last month.
There are several reasons for such concerns. The first is obvious. Copyright infringement. The AI-generated fake Drake only sounds like a star because he learned to do so by listening to Drake. So the music companies are arguing that Drake should get a portion of the proceeds from those songs. Some musicians like grimesHowever, while splitting the royalty income 50/50, I am happy to opt-in to allow my voice to be duplicated. Copyright issues may take time to resolve, but ultimately music companies and other parties will likely lay out a framework for how to license the music used by AI generators.
But Universal has another reason to be concerned. The market share of major label music on streaming platforms is slowly but steadily declining. In 2017, the Big Four suppliers accounted for 87% of his total viewing volume on Spotify. By 2022, it has decreased to 75%.
Listening is increasingly biased toward music from independent artists, as well as ambient tracks and AI-generated songs. Grange has been talking about the “oversupply” of content on Spotify in recent months. Spotify adds 100,000 new songs every day. AI has played a big role in this, he says.
Big music companies are interested in this because they earn billions of dollars in royalty income that is directly related to their streaming rates. But the change also fundamentally changes the way Spotify works, raising big questions about how we will consume music in the future.
For a long time, Spotify has been compared to Netflix. It was a place where you could pay a monthly subscription fee to access a large catalog of professionally produced music. But Spotify is turning into a hybrid of Netflix and YouTube. The platform not only allows you to listen to Megastar’s music, but also a 30-second rain clip of him that anyone with access to a computer can create in seconds.
AI has helped facilitate this change. A senior music industry executive described AI-generated music to me as “enhanced UGC.” This refers to “user-generated content,” which are hand-crafted clips like cats, memes, and covers of popular songs that are taking YouTube by storm.
Grange and colleagues, including Warner Music Chief Executive Robert Kinkle, are discussing developing an economic model for streaming. “There’s no way an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same…[as]It’s raining on the roof,” Kinkle said recently.
What will this model look like? Perhaps all user-generated music will be siphoned off entirely to another platform, and professional music will remain on premium services. Spotify may be reluctant to agree to that. However, further changes are imminent in the industry. “There’s only one chapter left in the turmoil in the music industry,” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at consultancy Midia. “There is still more to come.”
anna.nicolaou@ft.com
