Freedom and restriction of Generative AI in music.

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 340

Spotify, a move against AI-generated music by Boomy

Spotify removed thousands of songs by AI-generated music start-up Boomy as bots start posing as fake listeners. With the help of bots, the start-up artificially increased clicks and listens for uploaded songs. Two years since its launch, Boomy enables users to select from a variety of styles or descriptors, such as “rap beats” or “rainy nights”, to produce a track generated by AI. Once completed users can release music on streaming services which will then generate royalty payments. Opinion: Fake streaming has been an issue for a long time, with new AI models fraud bots have become more and more sophisticated and harder to detect for Spotify. This recent step shows how Spotify continues to work on policies with the aim of protecting its platform against fraud.

Spotify accepts AI generated music, but no AI generated listeners.

Bytedance Douyin releases rules that regulate usage of AI on platform

On 09.05. Chinese TikTok version Douyin released a set of 11 principles to guide usage and labelling of AI. Main focus is the clear labelling of manipulated and synthetic data. In addition, publishers have to be officially registered and authenticate themselves with their real name as well as take responsibility for consequences regarding the publishing of AI-generated content. Opinion: The rules shall prevent fraud and false information and make sure that synthetic or manipulated media is clearly labeled and can be identified as such by everyone. This includes also sound and music, with harsh penalties pushed against those who violate copyright.

One incident pushing this development could have been the AI-Drake song that went viral on TikTok, from which the artist distanced himself.

Grimes enables creators to make music with AI-generated version of her voice, but tasteful!

Popular Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes is collaborating with music-industry platform CREATESAFE. Artists can use AI-generated audio of her unique voiceprint GrimesAl-1 to make music on her new platform elf-tech (yes, it’s the name of it). 50 percent of master recording royalties will be received by the creator while she claims the other half. Opinion: Grimes mentioned that, of course, certain texts or lyrics should not be used and asks fans and artists to be „tasteful“. Though she asked for no political topics or other offensive contents to be used, it is unclear how this is defined.

Sounds good in theory, unclear if copyright can still be claimed in case of lawsuit as the term “tasteful” is hard to define.