“Spotify removes AI-generated songs amid suspicions of streaming manipulation”

The removed songs were uploaded through the company Boomy, which lets users generate songs “within seconds” using AI and upload them to various streaming platforms. The more often the tracks are listened to, the more they can earn from them. Spotify deleted about 7 percent of songs uploaded via Boomy, reports from Financial Times.

The Boomy songs were removed on suspicion of manipulation of the streaming figures. In addition, software poses as human listeners in order to boost royalty payments. Spotify confirms to the newspaper that it has removed part of the Boomy material.

Boomy says she is “against any form of manipulation or artificial streaming.” The company is in talks with Spotify about restoring part of its catalog. According to the startup, users have created more than 14 million songs in total.

Music industry sees AI mood hanging

Concerns are growing in the music industry about both the advance of AI for music creation and the manipulation of streaming platform systems. More than a hundred thousand new songs are added to services such as Spotify every day. Music giant Universal Music had reported the suspicious streaming activities of the Boomy songs to Spotify, the FT writes.

A Universal executive said last week that he was concerned about the “explosive development of AI”. According to him, this leads to new legal issues, because the software that can create music has been trained with existing copyrighted material.

Universal recently called on music services to ban AI systems from their platforms. The company made that call after a song that mimicked the voices of Drake and The Weeknd with AI went viral.

‘Spotify better at detection manipulation’

Both the use of AI for music creation and the ‘buying of streams’ are not new in themselves, but both problems have increased considerably in recent months. Plenty of websites advertise the option to buy thousands of Spotify streams for a few dollars.

Spotify CEO Antoine Monin recently said against Bright that the company has recently gotten better at detecting manipulative behavior. “We have invested in technology to prevent artificially influencing the number of streams listened to. Spotify scores relatively well in this area compared to other music services. We have made significant progress. This is also a very important topic for the music industry.” Monin said.

He does not want to say how exactly Spotify recognizes that there is ‘artificial behaviour’. “Every detail about this can help people with bad intentions.” The CEO further points to a French study that estimated that between 1 and 3 percent of all streams on Spotify, Deezer and Qobuz in 2021 were fraudulent. Most of them are unknown artists. At Spotify, 85 percent of streams detected as fraudulent were songs that fell outside the top 10,000.