(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
As a regular music listener and consumer, it’s easy to simply want to stick on your headphones, press play, and zone out from the world. Unfortunately, Spotify is making that reality much less simple.
It seems now that the tipping point has been reached for many artists using the platform. In essence, it’s just not financially viable unless you’re receiving millions of streams per month. Naturally, that takes time to build into a steady climb, and the road to getting there is often insurmountable.
On top of that, there’s also the increasing weight of ethical issues pressing down on the streamer, which is now becoming too glaring to simply look away from. As such, the investment from its CEO, Daniel Ek, in a German AI military drones company was really the straw that broke the camel’s back for many, with a litany of artists facilitating a mass exodus from the platform, as well as other streamers, over the course of recent weeks.
It may be that we are on the cusp of a whole new era of streaming and music consumption beginning. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, for example, announced this week that they have found a home on the artist-led Bandcamp, where listeners can name their price of any monetary value to access their catalogue of albums.
In some ways, it seems like a small burrow of light amid the bleakest of dark skies. A multi-billion-dollar corporation like Spotify, ultimately, isn’t going to be adversely affected by losing a few artists who, in comparison to the big guns of the industry and with all due respect, were never pulling in the same scale of fans and traction. But the slew of bad press this has generated has evidently been enough to make them sit up and listen, at least in some small capacity.
Despite their seeming endorsement of AI practices, which should act as a stark warning call to everyone, not just the artists, the platform evidently felt some need to put up a front of fighting the fires. As a result, they’ve recently introduced a new set of terms outlining their stance on AI. The overarching takeaway is that other companies and individuals are forbidden to use Spotify’s data to train AI models.
OK, that sounds like a bit of progress, right? Not so fast. While this is somewhat welcome news for artists, especially those who have been targeted by their accounts being hacked and AI deepfake songs being uploaded to their profiles, there are a number of catches that still come with this. For starters, it still allows Spotify to use its own data to train AI, including features such as its algorithms and DJ, so it’s not as if any material changes are being made within the heart of the way the streamer functions.
The effect is that artists at least have the slight peace of mind that their music is no longer being externally combed and mined for technologically geared content from malign forces. But this doesn’t really negate many of the other aspects of the issues at hand – AI is threatening to decimate the industry, and all Spotify has truly done is to put up a ruse to look as if they are doing something about it. The bleak truth is that they’re stopping others from using AI for their own gain and instead keeping it all to themselves.
Time is yet to tell whether alternative platforms like Bandcamp will truly take hold and start a reinvented movement of streaming, which is fairer on both sides of the spectrum, including the artists and not just the listener. Unfortunately, it seems it may only work if a massive artist with a current currency, like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, or Ed Sheeran, took the leap. Is that all that likely? It’s up to you to decide.
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