<\/p>\n
The Tidal application is seen on an Apple Inc. iPhone arranged for a photograph in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, June 27, 2017. Photographer: Andrew Harrer\/Bloomberg<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a9 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP<\/small><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n Last week the music service Tidal posted a new policy on AI-generated music<\/a>. Starting in mid-July, the service will tag music that it detects as 100% AI-generated with an icon in its user interface, and it will no longer pay royalties on that music. In the future, it will require that labels and distributors identify AI-generated music when uploading it to the service. With this, Tidal\u2019s AI policy becomes one of the most stringent of any music service.<\/p>\n Tidal\u2019s new AI policy is just the latest in a rapidly evolving series of changes that music services are making to cope with the fast-increasing volume of music resulting from generative AI platforms. Deezer reported<\/a> that, as of the end of March, it was taking in an average of 170,000 tracks per day, 75,000 (44%) of which it detected as AI; and it detects as much as 85% of AI track streams as fraudulent (e.g., generated by bot farms to siphon off royalties). <\/p>\n The deluge of AI music creates various complexities for music services. The essential problem is that while it\u2019s possible to determine whether a track was AI-generated with reasonable confidence, as we\u2019ll see, it\u2019s not possible to tell whether it\u2019s one of the huge number of AI tracks intended for streaming fraud<\/a> or one that was generated by a (human) team looking to build an audience for an \u201cAI artist.” An increasing number of the latter have generated tracks that have gotten enough listenership to garner chart placements<\/a>.<\/p>\n This dichotomy is leading music services to make a range of policy decisions on AI music. Though these are changing regularly, here is a current summary:<\/p>\n Digital music services’ varied policies on AI-generated music.<\/span><\/p>\n Bill Rosenblatt<\/small><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n First, will they accept AI music submissions at all? So far, the answer is generally yes \u2013 with the exception of Bandcamp. Bandcamp, home to lots of music by indie artists, relies on its user base to implement a no-AI policy: when a user complains about an AI track on the service, Bandcamp will investigate and potentially take it down. <\/p>\n The question is whose responsibility it is to determine whether a track is AI-generated or not. Music services generally would prefer it if the record labels and indie digital distributors that upload music to them would provide that information themselves \u2013 which in turn relies on musical artists to make these disclosures. <\/p>\n A few services, including Spotify<\/a> and Apple Music<\/a>, have developed AI disclosure tag sets that \u2013 for now, at least \u2013 they are asking uploaders to use voluntarily. The music industry standards body DDEX has also published a simple set of AI tags as part of its ERN (Electronic Release Notification) standard. Unfortunately, these tag sets are all different from one another. <\/p>\n<\/section>\n So most music services are identifying AI tracks themselves using AI detection technology, which examines music files and determines whether they were purely generated by some of the known AI music platforms. This technology is fast becoming part of the \u201cplumbing\u201d layer of digital music, along with other technologies such as ACR (automated content recognition) and the DDEX standards for communicating music release and consumption data.<\/p>\n Some of the larger music services, such as Spotify and Apple Music, have developed this kind of technology in house, mainly for use in detecting spam and fraud. <\/p>\n There\u2019s also a growing number of vendors of AI detection technology. Deezer developed the technology for its own service and decided to make it available to third parties. Another is Ircam Amplify, the commercial division of Paris\u2019s IRCAM music and audio technology research institute, which has developed various audio technology products over the past several years. A number of startups such as HumanStandard, SoundSafe.ai, Detect.Music, and various others are offering this type of technology too. And other \u201cplumbing\u201d vendors such as Pex (ACR) and Beatdapp (streaming fraud detection) have added AI detection as part of their technology stacks.<\/p>\n AI detection technologies typically report a level of confidence that a music track was purely generated by AI, and they are tuned to prioritize minimizing false negatives (misidentifying a human-created track as AI) over false positives (misidentifying a pure AI track as human-created). They aren\u2019t able to detect the increasingly common use of AI to assist in tasks such as production and mastering, or if only some of the instruments on a track were AI-generated. <\/p>\n In addition to music services, independent digital distributors \u2013 which feed music from indie artists to the music services \u2013 are also adopting AI detection to enforce submission policies. Two of the biggest, TuneCore and CD Baby, recently announced restrictions on pure AI music on their services. TuneCore only allows 100% AI-generated music made with AI platforms that are \u201ctrained on fully licensed datasets<\/a>.\u201d CD Baby goes further: it bans all fully AI-generated music<\/a> and will terminate accounts of users who attempt to upload it repeatedly.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n Tidal will be the second music service that shows the results of its AI detection to users. Deezer was the first one to display \u201cAI-generated content\u201d tags in its user interface, starting in June of last year. Spotify has announced<\/a> plans to display uploader-submitted AI disclosures \u2013 though not the results of its own AI detection technology \u2013 in the future.<\/p>\n The next variable in music services\u2019 AI policies is whether a service will promote tracks it detects as AI to users, such as on algorithmic playlists or in search results. Services that have opted not to do this include Deezer and the audiophile-oriented music service Qobuz<\/a>. <\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the question of whether to pay royalties to uploaders for plays of pure AI tracks, given that (in US law, at least) they aren\u2019t eligible for copyright protection. Most music services take steps to detect fraud \u2013 which has become a huge business<\/a> \u2013 and don\u2019t pay royalties on those streams. Qobuz and Tidal have adopted the more stringent \u2013 and much simpler \u2013 policy of not paying royalties on detected AI music at all. <\/p>\nDigital Music Services\u2019 AI Policies<\/h2>\n
AI Detection Technology<\/h2>\n
Tagging and Promoting AI Music for Users<\/h2>\n