[awfulneutral]

I listened to a few of the songs and I could definitely believe they are AI. They are extremely clean, near-identical covers, like karaoke versions I guess. If Spotify is funding these, that means they would be trying to poach money directly from the biggest artists/companies. That seems like a much bigger controversy than creating generic background music and spreading that around their algorithms.

[leoc]

The reporting suggests that the "Perfect Fit Content" scheme began in 2017 and had been rolled out on a large scale by 2023, so it's unlikely that it has been reliant on AI music. (It does seem very likely that Spotify is now at least experimenting with replacing or augmenting the ghost musicians with AI.) I don't at all accept that Spotify running a kind of self-payola system with own-brand music is only a big controversy if AI-generated tracks are involved.

[awfulneutral]

I didn't mean it would be a big controversy because it's AI, I meant because they would be replacing major label/artist songs with their own karaoke versions, and then manipulating their own algorithms to promote them. That seems like something the labels would really fight against.

[leoc]

But they don't have to target individual musical acts or individual songs for replication to drain their purses. Time spent listening to Spotify's own-brand lo-fi is time not spent listening to playlists full of expensive third-party musicians, including musicians in whole other genres. And if they did want to make and promote close covers of individual songs then they'd probably call humans: people are already very good at that (many such covers exist already) and (IANAL!) the legal risks are probably smaller and better-understood. After all, copyright defences of unlicensed generative AI seem to rely on the notion that its output is transformative, but presumably it would be hard to make that claim when you ask an AI to produce a near-exact replica of a song you put into its training data.