AI-generated music is appealing to streaming services, not least because it could potentially eliminate royalty payments and boost profits. While providers such as Qobuz are distancing themselves from AI-generated music, Tidal and Spotify already have very lax AI policies. According to a report by the Financial Times, Spotify is now planning a full-scale AI push, set to launch as early as the first quarter of 2027.
The streaming market leader is apparently adding an optional AI package to its Spotify Premium subscription, reportedly costing $4 to $5 per month, which could make the service’s Premium subscription up to 39 percent more expensive. Those willing to pay these additional costs are expected to receive two main new features. First, the ability to have artificial intelligence regenerate existing songs as remixes. And second, the option to generate any song as a cover version by any band, thereby changing the song’s style.
I didn’t get it. Imagine the sales pitch here.
“Yeah we are going to make your subscription more expensive, but you’ll get more slop in return!”
Why?!
Because execs have no clue what users want and live in a parallel world in which people want what execs wish people wanted.
Then they’ll be baffled by the low take on their offer and their next step will be to force-enroll existing users on a free trial that won’t stop by itself, hoping some of them will just let it run and get milked.
They have to. This is actually good news. It shows they are losing revenue and are desperate. If you still use Spotify that’s on you.
The article lays it out pretty clearly on why if you read it.
It is unclear how these AI-generated songs will affect the royalties Spotify pays to artists. The company is reportedly already negotiating with record labels, but how high or low the payments to artists will ultimately be is not yet known. Spotify is also reportedly struggling to persuade some artists to agree to the use of their music by AI. According to an analyst quoted by the Financial Times, around 8 percent of all Spotify subscribers could be paying this surcharge for AI-generated songs by the end of 2028.
Money, it’s always money. That’s roughly 25 million subscribers that would be predicted to sign up for AI slop at 5 bucks a month. Combine that with what I’m sure would be looking to pay the artists a lot less and only having to pay for computing resources instead of people, that’s still a fuck ton of money for them.
“Ai efficiencies will be passed on to the customer!”
Remember this next time billionaires say they’ll happily pay onto UBI or whatever.
Because a lot of people don’t care or even like this stuff.
So they will pay more for it, right? Right?
Incredible they got this far with that shitty app.
Exactly. I’m using a fork, which is AI-generated, but still way better and lighter than the original client: https://spotifast.rocks/
They need to make this provider agnostic somehow. That would be amazing.
First, the ability to have artificial intelligence regenerate existing songs as remixes.
Corpos are truly out of ideas.
We made them this way by swallowing their shit for decades. No wonder they think it’ll work again this time.
Im just realizing that Youtube music pushing so many remixes in the discovery was just enshitfication or IP shrinkflation.
I dont even understand why music labels would want to work with these platforms at all if they are actively doing everything to cut them out and rip off their IP. Who needs enemies with friends like that…
Cackles maniacally in Plex lifetime pass and self hosting
Boycott them already. Stop paying them anything.
After the Helsing controversy I dropped them. I miss being able to play local files and better Japanese music coverage but I’m glad my streams are supporting the artists a little more.
I quit Spotify when they signed Rogan, but I remember its early days fondly - it used to have a free and open API. You could get visualisers, lyrics, BPM analysers for DJs, Last.fm integration… what a prime example of rampant enshittification.
Why would you pay for AI generated music, surely that has less value to people?
Like I don’t even totally hate the existence of AI generated music. But it isn’t worth anything to me. I can prompt it in seconds. If I wanted some kind of background music generator it would work for that, but I don’t see how that is worth any non zero amount of money.
Lol, why would anyone pay for slop? I wouldn’t accept this even if they paid me. I like my music exactly the way the artist made it, that’s why he’s an artist after all. Damn morons at Spotify…
The streaming market leader is apparently adding an optional Al package to its Spotify Premium subscription, reportedly costing $4 to $5 per month, which could make the service’s Premium subscription up to 39 percent more expensive.
This sentence is nonsensical - if you get an optional addon, then it’s per definition not a price increase.
It’s like if I went to the grocery store, bought the same items as before and then added several more to the cart, and claimed that “my grocery bill has increased”. Apples and oranges.
Homer_so-far.jpg
There’s people willing to pay an extra to listen a butchered automatic cover of a song where Spotify probably doesn’t even pay royalties on that?
I thought the market would prefer the opposite: pay extra for a noslop guarantee, with a full monthlysubscription refund if a slop is accidentally inserted in a playlist
Exactly, I would have thought you might have some AI only free/cheaper tier. At least that kinda makes sense as a use case, not that I could see myself ever paying for it
Well, gotta make all the AI cost back somehow. Most people are too comfortable to actually change anything, so they’ll just pay more
Spotify already sucks and is crammed full of ads. I mean Pandora may be mid but my ad-free tear remains ad-free. I miss when they were the Music Genome Project though.
Cancelled that shit back when they became a platform for right wing grifters.
and now AI music, because roegan wasnt enough apparently.
Same. Past behaviour is so often a good indicator of future behaviour.
Now either you’re on Bandcamp, or you sell downloads directly on your website, or I’m off to bittorrent.
Stop fucking using slopify!
What alternative do you propose?
Qobuz. Deezer is owned by a Russian oligarch.
I am pretty happy with Deezer
deezer nuts
Got em
Thanks, I’ll check it out
You will not regret deez
Soulseek lmao
Soulseek truly is the goat.
I found my band’s album on there and called my mom to tell her I had made it as a musician
Haha, having somebody bother pirating and sharing your music is a good milestone! :)
Folks wanted my music so bad they were willing to commit minor crimes. I’m still touched, brings a tear to my eye.
There’s Qobuz, Deezer, and Tidal.
Qobuz also lets you purchase digital albums like Bandcamp but with a larger library. But there’s no 3rd-party app that supports it (streaming) outside of Google Play.
That being said, Tidal can be connected to via SoundCrowd if you don’t want an app through Google Play.
Upon going through the options, Deezer sounds like the less valuable of the 3, but your mileage may vary
Make a post and ask. This isn’t the first time this question has been put.
An actual proposal would have cost you less characters to type :D
This is why I buy cds from the artists I like . I have never and will never pay for a music streaming service. I prefer to cut out as many middlemen as possible.
This is why I buy cds from the artists I like .
I have a 50GB MP3 collection that I have curated since I was a teenager. Every time I hear news about streaming services, I watch from the sidelines and grab some popcorn.
Why MP3 and not lossless tho?
smaller is more portable tho.
(opus)
Opus is an amazing file format.
Oh yeah it was great when I started converting a bunch of stuff to opus. Same quality, less space taken.
I started with 128kbps MP3s (I was dumb when I was young as we all were) so I just stayed with the format. Nowadays they’re all much higher bitrate and I honestly don’t hear the difference.
You can use opus instead of MP3 to save space. 96kbps opus equals to 320kbps MP3.
That’s good to know! Time to batch-convert, I guess. :)
Have you done an ABX test? I love and produce music and have a good ear, and even though its embarrassing to admit, I don’t hear a difference. Honestly I suspect very few people can. https://abx.digitalfeed.net/
I haven’t actually, although I’ve wanted to for some time. I just prefer to store my music in lossless format.
That one is really easy to do, its the best out of many I tried. But yeah that’s fair, I get it from the standpoint of archiving. That extra data could be used for remastering/mixing/sampling purposes potentially
Unfortunately, most artists do not allow buying a digital copy of their music.
Same, it’s nice throwing on a whole album too, something that gets lost in the shuffle streaming.
Usually either try to buy from the bands directly or on Bandcamp. For older stuff, I’ll check out local record stores or Discogs.
Yeah, track 7 is awesome
I learn about new tracks on Spotify. It’s been good for that here and there. Or when someone at an event wants to hear a particular song.
I do both though. Also have a massive mp3 and flac library.
But if this is true I guess I’ll be looking at another service.
Yeah, I buy a ton of digital and vinyls. Mostly for this reason.
Digital priority
Artist’s website
Bandcamp
7digital
HD Tracks
Amazon Music
There are probably more middlemen to get it from a CD. The least middlemen would probably be downloading from the musicians’ official website.
I would recommend Qobuz to anyone who wants almost the same ease of use, but with higher audio quality.
What the hell is qobuz?
Edit:
Decided to do a trial, then they asked for a credit card. Meh. I can’t stand this business practice.
I think in the case of Qobuz, asking for your credit card details actually isn’t some dirty tactic to get you to subscribe accidentally. They just have to avoid people creating new trial accounts month after month, because it would become very expensive for them if they didn’t. They don’t have an ad-supported plan by design and pay out $0.018-0.019 per stream (Spotify supposedly pays about $0.003-0.005). So if you listen to 500 songs during your trial, they lose about $9 in payouts alone.
I think, in this case, it’s actually legitimate to use your credit card details in order to verify that you’re actually a new potential customer.
Well it’s just another thing for me to remember and I don’t want to deal with it. 🤷
It’s really good though. I stopped using Spotify about a year ago and switched to qobuz.
It’s not perfect (no podcasts and their generated “daily” mixes are meh), but the quality is top notch, and you can also buy DRM free music through them.
I switched to them because they didn’t have podcasts. Podcasts are a fundamentally different experience and have no place in my music streaming app. At this point, I just host a navidrome server with about 600 albums, but I still use Qobuz to buy music that isn’t on bandcamp (they offer flac downloads for bought music).
Sell me on it more. I look at the lack of podcasts as good because I hate blending them together. It messes up your stats, resumes a podcast when you’d rather listen to music etc. I don’t want to clear my awesome queue I might have going on just to listen to a podcast with no way back to that queue.
Personally, lack of podcasts is a good thing. Trying to run both podcasts and music through Spotify sucked. It’s way better to just have a dedicated RSS podcast player like AntennaPod.
I like the idea of access to both streaming and DRM free downloads. That being said, I can’t find any players that support their streaming outside of Google Play.
I’m probably going to end up switching to Tidal since it’s supported by SoundCrowd and just downloading DRM free music from Qobuz since few of the artists I listen to are on Bandcamp
I listed out some of their permissions bullshit in another comment
Yep. Also switched to Qobuz. I may leave at some point in the future, but I’ll least I’ll be able to take the music I bought with me!
