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At this point, the streaming music landscape feels pretty well settled. Giants like Spotify, Amazon, Apple and YouTube duke it out at the top, while plenty of other players like Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer try their best to stand out from the pack. Somewhat surprisingly, though, a new player emerged in September. Coda Music<\/a> used the recent backlash around Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek<\/a> as a way to differentiate itself from the number one streamer, calling out Ek\u2019s controversial funding of defense technology firm Helsing earlier in the year. (Spotify\u2019s refusal to stop airing ICE recruitment ads certainly hasn\u2019t helped the platform, either.)<\/p>\n Today, the fledgling service is announcing a new feature that feels designed to answer another of the recent Spotify controversies: AI slop music flooding the platform<\/a>. In response, Coda Music is launching AI identification tools with the purpose of finding and labeling songs that weren\u2019t composed by actual humans.<\/p>\n There are a few prongs to Coda\u2019s approach. For starters, any artist added to Coda will be reviewed for AI origins, and their profile will be labeled \u201cAI Artist\u201d so that listeners know what they\u2019re getting into. Coda is also letting users flag profiles of artists if they suspect the music is AI-generated; the company will then review them and label them if necessary.<\/p>\n Finally, there\u2019s a toggle in settings that just lets you turn off AI artists entirely. Obviously, how useful this setting is will depend on how good Coda gets at labeling AI-created music as such, but I can definitely see the appeal in just flipping that to \u201coff\u201d and avoiding as much slop as possible.<\/p>\n Besides its stance on AI and the assurance that the company does not \u201cinvest in war,\u201d there are a few other differentiators about Coda Music. The company says that it currently paying the \u201chighest per-stream rate\u201d in the industry \u2014\u00a0while at the same time, it acknowledges that no one is paying enough to artists. \u201cThe real problem isn\u2019t how much is paid per stream, it\u2019s that streaming alone doesn\u2019t pay enough,\u201d the company\u2019s website says<\/a>. \u201cAnd minor improvements to a fundamentally flawed per stream model will not help.\u201d<\/p>\n To that end, the company also lets users pick an \u201cindependent or qualifying artist\u201d who gets $1 of their monthly subscription fee. Sure, it\u2019s only a dollar, but it\u2019s the kind of thing that sweetens the pot at least a little bit for musicians.<\/p>\n And Coda has good reason to want to make itself visible to users and artists alike. The last major differentiator for Coda is the company\u2019s ambitions to turn its app into a social, music-sharing feed where you get recommendations from humans rather than algorithms. To that end, users can share anything from the app in their feed, and it also allows you to share external links and photos as well (go ahead and post your blurry images from that NIN concert!).<\/p>\n The app\u2019s home page prominently features fan-made playlists and recommended users to follow in addition to the usual suggestions based on what you\u2019re listening to already. And there\u2019s a social tab where you can see posts from people you follow; share songs, artists or albums; and see posts from artists you follow. That last part is key, as Coda wants artists interacting and sharing as well as just end users.<\/p>\n