Spotify’s Playlists Play, AI’s Costs, and Copyright Wars: A Perfect Storm for Creativity
Edition 14
Hi folks
Happy Thursday! Welcome to The Industry Playlist 🎵
Had to skip on the weekly digest last week because of the All About Music conference. Instead I wrote a piece deconstructing AAM, check it out if you haven’t already.
More importantly, the government withdrew the Broadcasting Bill 2024 (BiBi) yesterday! Big win! This of course is not going to be the end of it, expect the government to come back with another version as things go. Apart from personal liberty considerations, there are many good reasons why such a law should not exist.
Just a few days back, Goa government filed a police complaint against ‘unknown persons’ for defaming Goa using social media. Cops have been sent to Haryana and other states to investigate. Small men with fragile egos. The post in question? A YT video creator alleging a land scam in Goa. I thought the video was level-headed and asked important questions. You can see how govt overreach to censor and criminalize creators online can be misused politically; besides being a brazen waste of administrative machinery and public funds. We don’t need a content license raj in this country.
Anywho, this week I dive into…...*drum rolls*…....AI.
AI is everywhere; squeezing everything that involves human-led creativity in music - curation, artistry, culture. It risks stifling creativity as we know it before we see new forms of cultural benefits emerge. With the legal landscape heating up with AI companies aggressively pushing the boundaries of fair use, things are setting the stage for a radically different creative-commercial ecosystem.
Finally, I’m enjoying listening to this London-based duo called Payfone. They’re unique because their tracks average 7-8 mins in length - which is unheard of these days unless you are an electronic producer. Check out Sofian 🎵
Now, let’s get to it.
🪁 SONIC SHIFTS
Spotify Mixes is to music what Amazon Solimo is to retail
Daniel Ek recently raved how there are 8 Bn user-curated playlists on Spotify. Sounds great as a headline but there’s a lot to read between the lines. Playlists are Spotify’s biggest retention strategy. Curate good playlists, keep folks hooked and you get to keep your listeners coming back (not to detract that it is only fair for any DSP to do that).
Now, there only 2 problems with that. First, there’s allegations that Spotify is flooding it’s playlists with AI music. More plays of AI music, they get to pay lesser royalties. Smart, easy way to capture the earshare while earning greater profits. Once again, Content > Art strikes back in the Big Tech agenda. Screw work by real artists.
Second, more insidious and damaging, Spotify is doing to music what Amazon did to retail. Amazon has full insight in to what customers are buying on their platform, and slowly they launched their own product line based on purchase data (remember Solimo? That’s basically Amazon in disguise).
Spotify seems to be doing this too - learning from user playlists and then pushing their own playlists while throttling the rest. All the clarion calls to embrace social dies on this plank. Spotify will always push its own ‘mixes’ on top of the search result; pushing everything machine-led than human-curated.
There is an economic incentive behind this - Spotify anyway pays less royalties to artists to promote their music on their playlist vis-a-vis user playlists. We are increasingly moving to a world where the music you listen to is because Spotify wanted you to listen to it.
AI cost trap might stifle human-led creativity before culture evolves
There is no such thing as a free lunch. The AI industry needs to earn $600 Bn per year to pay for the massive hardware spend happening. Somebody has got to pay for this, and its not clear who will. Somebody asked an important question -
So... if artists don’t give their consent, aren't even asked to give it, can’t opt out, and listeners aren’t too happy when they hear a blatant AI song either, do we really need more tools like Suno, no matter how technologically great they are?
No one is against technological progress—it's in our DNA. But as tensions and opportunities surrounding AI intensify, something has to give. Beyond the economics, there’s a looming cultural risk: human-led creativity might suffer a significant decline before a genuinely collaborative form of machine-assisted creativity takes hold.
While we’re often promised a future where AI and human creativity coexist harmoniously, it’s crucial to remember that culture isn’t something we can force into being—it evolves, often slowly and unpredictably. The real danger lies in an AI bubble bursting before this new cultural synergy can develop, leaving behind a void where human creativity once thrived.
Fair Use offensive in the copyright wars
The legal battle over copyright in the age of AI is becoming increasingly complex as AI companies take a more aggressive stance. OpenAI’s recently challenged The New York Times to prove the originality of their copyrighted articles. This is a bold move that shows how murky the question of originality has become.
At the heart of this is the fair use doctrine. It’s a rule that lets people use copyrighted material without permission in certain cases, like for critique or education. Suno and Udio are leaning on this to defend their AI-generated work against the RIAA, claiming their use is fair.
But fair use isn’t always clear. It’s based on a mix of factors, like how much of the original work is used and whether it harms the market for the original. As AI continues to blur the lines between inspiration and reproduction, the crucial question becomes: at what point does inspiration cross into plagiarism?
This boundary will likely only be clarified by future legal precedents. Until that happens, there’s a lot at stake. How these legal battles play out will determine whether AI creations are seen as fair use or copyright infringement, shaping the future of creativity across the board.
📚 CURATED INSIGHTS
The Unlikely Odds of Making it Big (in music) - It’s really tough to breakout. The Pudding is out with another brilliant visual essay. They followed 7000 artists over 3 years in NYC who headlined a small venue; only 21 made it ‘big’, i.e., headlining a show of over 3k capacity.
A Case for Completion - Will Page spent nearly a decade as Spotify’s Chief Economist. He’s had a front row seat of how every piece of the music industry has evolved in the streaming age. He’s advocating a new way to calculate streaming payouts that is fair to artists. Here is an interview with if you want a more conversational style of learning about the new royalty model he’s proposing.
A scaled-down music industry - “algorithms are limiting the future to the past.” Today everything is mediated through algorithms that simply rehashes from past expressions and past popularity; severely limiting our creative expression and leading to the mediocrity of ideas we are currently all faced with.
YouTube is winning the streaming wars? - When you hear streaming companies consider everything that occupies a user’s time, even sleep, as a long-term competitor - you know things are getting hot.
6 ways to involve and engage your fanbase - Minimum viable community. Word.
🔥 KEEP TRACK OF
Spotify’s shift into Video - The transition of Spotify from a standalone audio platform to a more entertainment platform has begun. I wrote about Spotify increasingly taking inspiration from TikTok in Edition 11.
❄️ INTERESTING STUFF
DJs at the Polls - US Presidential Elections are only a few months way and folks are getting creative to get voters to show up to vote. DJ at the Polls brings local DJs to polling sites around the country to celebrate the voting process with fun, family friendly music.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Rohit
AI is an interesting dilemma. We're moving into it fast and there's no stopping that train anytime soon. Thanks for the insight.