True story: I like to listen to lo-fi ambient playlists while I work. It’s the ideal soundscape for getting stuff done, calming without being too distracting. But I’ve found over the past year or so that it’s become increasingly difficult to find a playlist or YouTube video of lo-fi music that isn’t full of AI-generated slop. I can hear it from a mile away (if the obvious uncanny Midjourney images attached to them weren’t a big enough red flag.) Now, it’s gotten to the point where, if I can’t locate a real human behind the channel, or they don’t actively note that their work is made without AI, I assume it’s AI. And that sucks.
But I’m sadly not alone on this journey of auditory confusion. Spotify has been at the forefront of polluting its users playlists and recommendations with vast swaths of AI slop. Many Spotify users have been vocal in their complaints, noting how nigh-on impossible it is to avoid this crap. No matter how carefully you curate your music, AI somehow finds its way in. And it seems that Spotify isn’t in much of a hurry to fix the problem. They’ve made a few concessions, mind you. In April, it launched, a test feature which shows, in a song’s credits, if an artist used AI. But that is a voluntary system that requires everyone involved to be honest, and AI slop merchants typically don’t want you to know that they’re tricking you.
Thousands of these AI slop tracks are uploaded to streaming platforms every day. They’re trying to outnumber the humans, to make it impossible to tell the difference. I imagine Spotify is not so secretly thrilled about the prospect of having fewer actual humans to pay out their $0.004 per stream royalties to artists. Unfortunately, this is becoming a new norm.
YouTube Music and Amazon Music have also avoided putting clear labels and filters on their platforms for users to avoid AI nonsense. By comparison, Deezer, a smaller platform, as noted by the BBC, “began both tagging albums that contain AI generated tracks produced by Suno, Udio and similar, and excluding the tracks from algorithmic recommendations or human-made playlists.” Apple Music said, external it was introducing “transparency tags” and were moving towards requiring disclosure from labels and distributors over whether or not they used AI. But, again, this seems to be voluntary, and slop houses don’t want to admit they’re selling you bilge from the plagiarism machine.
My confession is that up until fairly recently, I was still using the increasingly decrepit iPod I had been gifted for Father’s Day back in the 2010s. What that mostly meant was that all of the music I listened to was physically on that device – it was WiFi-only, so “streaming” wasn’t a thing for me. (*) I now use the company iPhone I carry as my iPod replacement, but I still have everything downloaded to it. So at least I always know what I’m playing.
I don’t have a good answer to the conundrum described above. My strategy works for me, but I obviously don’t find any new music that way. I’d like to think the AI music business will fall apart on its own, but it won’t. It’s going to take people being aware of it and actively rejecting it. Good luck with that. What’s your experience with this?
(*) For the most part, I do have a free Spotify account and the app on my Android phone, but I only use it in rental cars where I need that phone plugged in for mapping purposes. And I tend to go for basic classic rock type playlists, which at least avoid any obvious AI tunes. And since I first drafted this awhile ago, Spotify has started labeling AI artists and excluding them from algorithmic recommendations, which is a good start. But I doubt that remains the case forever, so continue to listen with care.