Comment on AI-generated music is here to stay. Will streaming services like Spotify label it?
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 week ago
A band of four guys with shaggy hair released two albums’ worth of generic psych-rock songs back-to-back. The songs ended up on Spotify users’ Discover Weekly feeds, as well as on third-party playlists boasting hundreds of thousands of followers. Within a few weeks, the band’s music had garnered millions of streams — except the band wasn’t real. It was a “synthetic music project” created using artificial intelligence.
The big problem is the people doing this are also gaming the algorithm to get on those “discover” feeds. You think someone that uses bots to fake a band wouldn’t use bots to inflate play count and make it look like they’re popular?
If companies don’t take a stand, they’re gonna end up just burning bandwidth so bots can listen to bots and real humans move on to a platform not filled with slop.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Even if the traffic was inflated by bots, there were many users that enjoyed the content itself. What that tells you is that people don’t have an inherent problem with the music, they just want transparancy around it.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 week ago
We don’t know that.
Now, I don’t use Spotify, but what I use allows me to pick specific songs, but it defaults to “shuffle”. Sometimes it’s stuff I listen to, sometimes it’s new.
I’m not aware of anything showing a breakdown of intentional listens and popping up on “shuffle”.
From a label perspective, AI is the best kind of band because it will do whatever you say, it will never refuse to do anything out of integrity. So it seems a reasonable assumption that what they’re aiming for is “elevator music” something innocuous enough that people won’t hit skip.
If it’s too good, people look into it, discover it’s AI, and stop caring about it.
Like the vast majority of AI stuff, it might work short term, but that’s only a novelty and those wear off. If people could opt out of AI music, the overwhelming amount of people would take the time to do so.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
If ratings were so easy to manipulate we would dispute every single top hit no matter if it was LLM-generated or not. Even in your shuffle usage, you probably don’t actively look at each new song, but just hit like when something catches your ear. So as long as the music is appealing people will listen. And Spotify only counts listens aften 30 seconds and only non-subsequent repeats.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s LLM-generated or not for most people. As with other LLM usage, while loud minority screams bloody murder, LLM tools breaks usage records. There are many issues with LLMs, but majority of people only care about the end result. And yes, some people would opt-out on principle, but saying that most people would is delusional.
Personally if LLM could replicate my favorite bands and supplementthe void when they are in between album releases, I can guarantee you that I would listen to it. That doesn’t mean I would stop listening to those artists.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I mean, yeah…
Drake just told on himself that was something that was done to inflate his own hits, so he assumed Kendrick had to have done the same thing.
Like, this has always been a thing, even back when it was giving a DJ an envelope of cash to get radio plays.
With an AI band, they don’t have to pay a band. So they’ll spend on this bullshit that, yes, human artists also use.