Spotify will not ban AI-powered music, says CEO Daniel Ek

Founder and CEO of Spotify Daniel Ek, has recently clarified that the streaming giant has no plans to pull artificial intelligence from the platform.

Ek told Zoe Kleinman of the BBC that there were valid uses of AI tech within the music industry — but that AI should be utilised with ethical constraints in place, and with full consent from artists.

Earlier this year, the platform pulled a track featuring AI-cloned voices of the performers Drake and The Weeknd.

While AI is not banned in all forms on the platform, the company does not allow its content to be used to train a machine learning or AI model, the likes of which can then produce songs.

"It is going to be tricky," he said when asked about the challenges AI poses to the music industry.

Neither Drake nor The Weeknd were aware that their duplicated vocals had been used in a song uploaded to the streamer. The track 'Heart on My Sleeve' was taken down by Spotify in April.

"You can imagine someone uploading a song, claiming to be Madonna, even if they're not. We've seen pretty much everything in the history of Spotify at this point with people trying to game our system," Ek said.

"We have a very large team that is working on exactly these types of issues."

This follows news that Spotify will be implementing AI technologies in order to generate translated versions of podcasts.

Amidst current concerns over the state of the traditional music industry, Irish singer-songwriter Hozier sat down for a candid interview with Stuart Clark, in our recent Student Edition of Hot Press.

Man vs. Machine: Hozier speaks to Hot Press. Credit: Barry McCall

"I think a lot of the AI talk has been a bit snake oily," Hozier said. "They're just probability machines regurgitating information back at you. I don't think they're terribly interesting.

"Art is something that human beings make. So semantically, I don't think AI can really do that..."