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Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI (www.bbc.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 31 points 4 months ago (6 children)

They've been using it as an infinite money glitch for awhile now. Make AI slop music and make a bunch of bots listen to it for the ad revenue. Nobody makes the music, nobody listens to the music, nobody listens to the ads, but Spotify gets paid. They'll never crack down on this unless they themselves have to stop. Until than, they'll just "assume" everything is made by people and play dumb when questioned.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Which is what I find crazy. That money comes from advertising which is not endless. How are the advertisers able to show any semblance of ROI when nothing is passing through? Obviously Spotify doesn't care if the proles voice their discontent. But how are they able to keep the advertisers from getting fed up with no returns?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    I think in business attribution is really difficult. Like figuring out why a click/purchase happened. It might be that these systems are so opaque and difficult to penetrate that nobody notices when hundreds of millions are missing. Or maybe the actual situation is a little different, like maybe real people do listen to AI music. I've heard a bit about that anyway. Though I've also heard about organized criminals combining affiliated artists and bot listens to launder money.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    I think that it is less about the ad revenue and more about decreasing the total proportion of streams that they have to pay royalties for. Spotify pays people to churn out AI music that they own, and they place that music on their popular playlists (to increase plus from actual listeners) and also have bot armies streaming it endlessly. Since royalties are not a fixed per-play fee, but rather a calculation based on the total amount of subscriber money divided by the total number of plays, massively increasing the total play count with music that does not require royalty payments means they pay out a lower proportion of what they take in each month.

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