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Over the last couple of months, in protest of CEO Daniel Ek hurling venture capital at the AI weapons company Helsing, a wave of musicians have stripped their music off Spotify. Indie faves like Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof, Hotline TNT, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have all joined the fray. Last week, Deradoorian and Massive Attack announced their departure from the platform, quickly followed by Sylvan Esso. Then, out of nowhere, on Tuesday, Ek announced his departure, stepping back but not exactly stepping out. He’s moving from CEO to Executive Chairman, and the company’s former CTO and CBO will become the new co-Chiefs, reporting to Ek.
It feels like the latest and grandest move in the streamer’s ongoing reputation rehabilitation campaign. During the last few months, the company has unleashed a flood of features and security measures that might just be conveniently timed, but also feel like tactics to deflect from the negative PR. Among them is a tool to let users DM friends on the platform—a feature the company reheated from a decade ago, when they tested then killed it after barely anyone used it. There’s also the introduction of lossless audio, which will let users listen to higher-quality versions of music.
The only update that actually hooked me is Spotify’s new announcement around AI and spam. They claim that over the last year, they’ve removed 75 million songs engaging in what they call “spam tactics”: people mass-uploading generic nonsense; the same songs uploaded twice or thrice; cheats to hijack the SEO (like stuffing keywords in titles to get algorithmically surfaced easier); and “artificially short track abuse,” which is when people split up longer songs into short segments to rack up royalties. The company teased a new “spam filter” that will help Spotify avoid recommending songs engaging in these slimy tricks going forward. They also announced a new tool that artists uploading music to Spotify can use to disclose if they’ve used AI.
Clearly this about-face is about saving face. Spotify’s emphasis on playlists and endless streaming has prioritized passive-listening background music in a way that’s directly facilitated spam and AI. As writer Liz Pelly discovered, the platform partnered with companies who hire songwriters to pump out stock tunes basically indistinguishable from AI, letting them release their music under a slew of fake “ghost” profiles. Spotify would cut deals to pay them less royalties, then stuff these conveyor-belt tunes on curated playlists, thus maximizing Spotify’s profits. Earlier this year, Spotify announced a partnership with voice generator ElevenLabs for AI audiobooks. We can’t forget about Spotify’s heavily hyped AI DJ, an algorithmic tour guide with a “stunningly realistic voice” that many people say barely works (on a recent car trip, a friend prompted it to play ocean-themed music and it played Frank Ocean). Ek himself has glazed AI, saying in 2023 that it’s “great culturally but also benefits Spotify because the more creators we have on our service, the better it is and the more opportunity we have to grow engagement and grow revenue.” In Spotify’s contextless vortex of passive consumption, pleasantly inoffensive AI slots right into the algorithm, infinite fodder to keep users chained to the platform.
