Spotify will not ban AI-made music, says boss
Spotify’s boss Daniel Ek has said the company will not completely ban content created by artificial intelligence from the music streaming platform.
Earlier in the year Spotify had pulled a track with AI-cloned voices of Drake and The Weekend. But Ek, speaking to the BBC, said whilst there are valid uses of AI in music, it shouldn’t be used to impersonate human artists without consent.
He added that using AI in music will likely be debated for “many, many years.”
Ek said 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.
AI is not banned in all forms on the music streaming service, but it 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.