[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.