IT STARTS WITH a familiar intro, unmistakably the Weeknd’s 2017 hit “Die for You.” But as the first verse of the song begins, a different vocalist is heard: Michael Jackson. Or, at least, a machine simulation of the late pop star’s voice.
It’s just one example of how artificial intelligence is seeping into the music industry. Surf YouTube or TikTok and you'll find many convincing AI-made covers. The software covers.ai has a waiting list for new users. But there are also tools that can generate instrumentals from text, give people a starting beat or inspiration, and help them to edit tunes.
AI will no doubt speed the creation of music, but that acceleration comes at a time when music streaming services are already inundated with content. There are now more than 100 million songs on Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Spotify. Listening to them all would take hundreds of years. Even more have been uploaded to SoundCloud. AI tools democratize music making. But there’s potential for a flood of AI-generated content to be unleashed onto streaming platforms, competing with real people and their compositions for the attention of your ears.
The music industry has often been trepidatious about innovation only to later embrace it. “Everything was seen as the end of music,” says Martin Clancy, editor of the 2022 book Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem. But AI developments are more than an automated drum machine, computerized synths, or even Napster. “AI is different—different because of its speed, its scale, its ability for
personalization,” Clancy says. “It really can outcompete with human endeavor and has the ability to produce a huge amount of material.”
It’s also a boon to the amateur creator. People might use generators for fun rather than to rival trained musicians, but their work may still crowd the market, says Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst and consultant with MIDiA Research. That poses a challenge, because some music streamers don’t differentiate between professionally produced and amateur content the way that video does (think Netflix compared to YouTube or TikTok). “Spotify will become the place where large portions of consumer-created music ends up, mixing in with everything else,” Cirisano says.
Music streamers may brag about their libraries, but quantity isn’t quality. So many of those songs are never or rarely played. In 2022, 50 percent of audio tracks followed by the entertainment data company Luminate in the US had 10 or fewer on-demand streams, according CEO Rob Jonas. It’s a years-long trend that spurred Forgotify, a website that shuffles through unplayed songs from Spotify. And streaming music and storing those vast libraries of unheard tracks has a notable environmental impact.
The music business is pushing back against AI. Universal Music Group, home to superstars like Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, and Bob Dylan, has urged Spotify and Apple to block AI tools from scraping lyrics and melodies from its artists’ copyrighted songs, the Financial Times reported last week. UMG executive vice president Michael Nash wrote in a recent op-ed that AI music is “diluting the market, making original creations harder to find, and violating artists’ legal rights to compensation from their work.”
Neither Apple nor Spotify returned requests for comment about how many AI-generated songs are on their platforms or whether AI has created more copyright infringement issues.
The news came on the heels of a request from UMG that a rap about cats in the style of Eminem be removed from YouTube for violating copyright. But the music industry is worried about more than AI copycatting a vocal performance; it’s also fretting about machines learning from their artists’ songs. Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America submitted a list of AI scrapers to the US government, claiming that their “use is unauthorized and infringes our members’ rights” when they use copyrighted work to train models.
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