A song which has been streamed millions of times in Sweden has been banned from music charts in the country because it was created by Artificial Intelligence.
‘I know, You’re Not Mine – Jag vet, du är inte min’ by the “artist” Jacub is currently top of the Spotify playlist of Sweden’s most popular songs, having amassed over five million streams since its release.
However, as the singer is AI-generated, Sweden’s music industry body has blocked the track from its official chart listings.
The folk-pop track is built around a finger-picked acoustic guitar melody and a soft vocal, and quickly became Sweden’s biggest song of the year so far.
Due to the song’s immense success, local journalists began investigating Jacub’s identity and found that the artist had no significant social media profile, media appearances or tour dates.
Swedish journalist Emanuel Karlsten found that the song was registered to a group of executives connected to Stellar Music, a music publishing and marketing firm based in Denmark. Two of the individuals work in Stellar’s AI department, per BBC News.
The producers – who call themselves Team Jacub – emailed Karlsten, saying that their creative process had been misunderstood.
“We are not an anonymous tech company that just ‘pressed a button,’” they wrote. “The team behind Jacub consists of experienced music creators, songwriters, and producers who have invested a lot of time, care, emotions, and financial resources.”
They described AI as a “tool” or an “assisting instrument” within a “human-controlled creative process”. They added that five million Spotify streams were proof of the song’s “long-term artistic value.”
Responding to questions as to whether Jacub was a real person, they wrote: “That depends on how you define the term.”
“Jacub is an artistic project developed and carried by a team of human songwriters, producers, and creators,” they added. “The feelings, stories, and experiences in the music are real, because they come from real people.”
Still, the IFPI Sweden music industry organisation has blocked the song from appearing in the country’s official national charts. “Our rule is that if it is a song that is mainly AI-generated, it does not have the right to be on the top list,” said Ludvig Werner, head of IFPI.
It is not the first example of an AI-generated track climbing up the charts – in November, ‘Walk My Walk’ by Breaking Rust topped Billboard’s Country Digital Songs chart, as well as the Viral 50 chart.
Sienna Rose, an AI-generated music creator with 2.7million monthly Spotify listeners, has also been shot up Spotify’s viral charts and even fooled Selena Gomez.
Last week, Bandcamp officially banned AI music from its platform. “If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team,” they said. “We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI generated.”
The AI-generated band The Velvet Sundown made headlines last year after gaining around 400,000 monthly Spotify listeners, with a “spokesperson” for the act later admitting that he was running a hoax aimed at “the media”.
The AI-generated artist Xania Monet also made headlines last year after signing a multimillion-dollar record deal and becoming the first AI artist to chart on the US Billboard rankings. The poet and designer behind the project said she saw Monet as “a real person” who is “challenging the norm”.
Kehlani has hit out at the success of Monet, telling fans that the proliferation of AI in music was “so beyond out of our control.” She went on to highlight the power of AI to create fully formed songs without users having to “credit anyone” involved in making the copyrighted works on which such generative music systems are trained.
“Nothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me,” she added.
In September, Cardiff rock group Holding Absence hit out at an AI ‘band’ which had overtaken their streaming figures on Spotify. Frontman Lucas Woodland wrote: “So, an AI ‘band’ who cite us as an influence (ie, it’s modelled off our music) have just overtaken us on Spotify, in only TWO months.”
The vocalist continued: “It’s shocking, it’s disheartening, it’s insulting – most importantly – it’s a wake up call.”
Meanwhile, audiences are reportedly finding it difficult to distinguish between “real” and AI music, with a recent report from streaming service Deezer finding that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between the two.
