In June, a band by the name of The Velvet Sundown abruptly appeared on Spotify. Listeners often found the band in parts of their Spotify-generated playlists, such as Daily Drive or Discover Weekly, sometimes excessively. While the band may have seemed harmless at first glance, or sounded like regular rock when put on shuffle, it didn’t take long for observers to find out it was AI-generated. Everything from the band’s profile pictures, the posts on their various social medias, their lyrics, their artist bio, and the music itself was completely AI. After being outed as a hoax, the band’s bio has changed, claiming that they are “an ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”
The core of this disturbing trend does not lie only in the creators but in the company of Spotify. If you look closely, you can see more and more AI elements to the app – generating a playlist cover with AI, making an AI playlist, and various other methods of promoting music that are slowly starting to weaken the service. While this is not necessarily Spotify specific, there are streaming services such as Deezer who created AI detectors and kept it to lower levels. As someone who has used Spotify since 2018, the deterioration is disappointing but not even fully surprising.
Streaming has completely changed the way we look at music, especially considering the rapid and popular consumption of short-form content throughout almost every social media platform across the globe. Songs are handed to us in small, 30 second pieces, which can impact the way we process them. In 2022, singer Steve Lacy caught attention for a concert where the mostly teenage audience only sang the viral part of his hit “Bad Habit”, and went silent afterward. In some cases, artists specifically curate their 15 to 30 second audios in TikTok by making a part of their song briefly engaging without carrying the same energy throughout the rest of their discography.
An issue is that like many other elements of pop culture, streaming has both extremely good and extremely bad qualities. On one end, smaller artists can promote their music easier than ever with the algorithm on their side. Spotify’s curated playlists share music from lesser known singers so that the public can easily hear it without even needing to open social media at all. At the same time, though, without streaming we most likely wouldn’t be in the situation we are in with the rise of AI artists. While the majority of The Velvet Sundown’s listeners were most likely bots, a number of the streams could have also been from people who innocently shuffled a playlist of recommendations. This is not the fault of the listener but of the company. Spotify, the most popular music streaming service, is slowly starting to show the more harrowing side of what they stand for.
Due to this, among other factors, such as artist pay and the political actions of CEO Daniel Ek, many artists have taken their music off of Spotify. Some of these artists include King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Thom Yorke of Radiohead (who removed music in 2013 but has since put it back on), Massive Attack, and Deerhoof. Artists such as David Byrne and Bjork have kept their music on Spotify, but openly spoke out against the app’s existence. The alternative rock band Belly made their Spotify profile picture “Delete Spotify”. Deerhoof posted a thought-provoking statement on their Instagram claiming that “Spotify is flushing itself down the toilet,” touching on both the actions of Ek as well as the capitalistic impact tied to streaming as a whole.
So, should you choose what’s easier over something you think is wrong? Or do you want to delete the app, but have virtually no way to transfer the music? As someone with hundreds of playlists both created and saved, it would be an extremely tedious task. This is what Spotify most likely realizes – that, despite the public controversy surrounding its database, there are too many loyal users for them to have a true, significant decline.
My feeling overall is that we need some sort of balance. There’s a very low chance of Spotify ever having their millions and millions of users stop using the platform. I, despite all of this, still continue using the platform for convenience. That seems to be an issue for the majority of these companies- the users know they are corrupt, acknowledge they are corrupt, but still continue using it. It’s a very strange situation to be in, as a great deal of our lives in our current world revolve around the digital media we consume.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to use Spotify, nor is there anything wrong with enjoying music from social media platforms. This is something we have done for decades now. However, while you do so, make an effort to acknowledge the benefits and disadvantages. Being aware of the concerns will not fully remedy the problem, but it will spread awareness- which is an extremely important thing to do.
