Romain Rouillard / Photo credit: JAKUB PORZYCKI / NURPHOTO / NURPHOTO VIA AFP
Spotify bangs its fist on the table. The Swedish music streaming giant has tackled a growing scourge within its rich catalog of more than 70 million titles. The platform has thus deleted tens of thousands of songs, created using artificial intelligence, reports the FinancialTimes. Songs generated using the Boomy tool and which represented a significant financial windfall for some users with questionable ethics.
The latter thus program robots intended to massively listen to the newly created songs. Enough to artificially inflate their audiences and therefore the income of their creators. A phenomenon spotted by Universal Music Group, which therefore decided to alert the platforms concerned, including Spotify.
The concern of the music industry
It must be said that Boomy’s ease of use is cause for concern in the music industry, which has just completed its transition to digital. With just a few clicks, an apprentice DJ can generate a melody after simply selecting a musical genre. Artificial intelligence then takes care of everything. Users can after that add items, adjust sound effects and even add voices to it. The songs are then downloaded legally on all streaming platforms.
Provided you do not imitate the voices of real artists, as was the case recently with Drake and The Weeknd, this practice is not illegal. On the other hand, the manipulation of plays for profit is likened to theft, as recalled last January by the National Center for Music. “Whoever inflates his viewing figures withdraws a share of remuneration from all those who do not cheat, by helping to lower the average remuneration per stream of all rights holders”, also indicated the public establishment.
14 million songs created on Boomy
Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal, also recently warned of the scale of the phenomenon, calling for a framework for the development of these artificial intelligences: “The recent explosive development of generative AI, if not controlled, will both increase the flow of unwanted content onto the platforms and create rights issues under existing (US) copyright law”.
Quoted by FinancialTimes, the company Boomy, which claims more than 14 million creations via its website, reaffirmed its opposition to “any type of manipulation or artificial streaming”. And assured”[travailler] with industry partners to solve this problem”.