Spotify is set to launch a new tool that will enable subscribers to create cover versions and remixes of their favorite songs – using AI. What that could mean for musicians, their fans and the music on your playlist.

Guests

Tatiana Cirisano, VP of Music Strategy at Midia Research, a global market intelligence and consulting firm focused on entertainment, music and digital media.

Damon Krukowski, musician and writer. Former member of the dreampop band Galaxie 500 and the psychedelic rock band Magic Hour. He’s now in the psychedelic folk duo Damon & Naomi. Legislative director and AI and streaming expert at the United Musicians & Allied Workers (UMAW), a national labor group for artists.

Christopher Wares, professor and assistant chair of the Music Business/Management department at Berklee College of Music.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

AMORY SIVERTSON: As I speak, countless songs are being scraped off the internet and used by tech companies to create AI-generated music. The artists who made the songs that are training the AI might not even know it and might never see a dime for it. So as you can imagine, the artists that do know this is happening don’t like it.

The record companies who own the licenses to much of this music, they don’t like it either, and neither do streaming platforms who pay to play licensed music. That includes Spotify, the world’s largest streaming platform.

CHARLIE HELLMAN: Things are starting to feel like the Wild West. Alongside new original work, there’s a surge of covers, remixes, reinterpretations built on existing music, and without a rights system in place, artists can lose control of their work and value can be created without it flowing back to the people who made it.

SIVERTSON: That’s Charlie Hellman, Spotify’s global head of music. Last month, he told a room of investors that Spotify can solve this. His pitch to combat the problem of AI in music? A new AI tool.

HELLMAN: Today we’re announcing landmark licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Universal Music Publishing Group. For the first time, fans will be able to legally create covers and remixes from participating artists’ and songwriters’ catalogs with both the original artist and the songwriter sharing in the value created.

SIVERTSON: Universal Music Group is the largest record label in the world, with dozens of subsidiary labels and thousands of artists under its umbrella.

Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Ariana Grande, Bob Dylan, Kendrick Lamar, Elton John, just to name a handful. That means with this new AI tool, Spotify users will be able to alter millions of songs. Wanna make a mashup of two songs you like, or a cover of one artist’s song by another artist you listen to? Do you want to make a down-tempo song up-tempo, or an up-tempo song down-tempo, or a completely acoustic arrangement of a song?

Maybe you wanna incorporate some vocals of your own. It’s all on the horizon. But Hellman stressed Spotify users will only be able to do this with songs from, quote, “participating artists.” The goal is simple: ensure that when fans create, artists benefit. This era of generation doesn’t need to threaten the future of music.

Because we built the system, legal, trusted, and aligned, we can make sure that the value flows back to the people who created it.

SIVERTSON: We reached out to Spotify to see if someone would be able to join today’s conversation. They declined. We asked if they could share any more details on this AI tool and when it would be released.

A representative said it was too soon to give any updates. But what we do know is that the AI remix tool that’s coming out will be available to Spotify Premium users, people who pay for the streaming platform, and eventually as a paid add-on. As for the remixes, mashups, and covers that paying users create, all Spotify users will have access to them for free.

So what happens when the power of AI meets the world’s largest streaming platform plus the world’s largest record label? Will artists really share in the value of what’s created by this new AI tool, as Spotify’s Charlie Hellman said? And what is that value? Who wants this tool, and what does it say about the music industry and about the music we might be listening to in the future?

Joining us now to help us start answering some of these many questions is Tatiana Cirisano. She’s the vice president of music strategy at Midia Research, a global market intelligence and consulting firm focused on entertainment, music, and digital media, and she joins us from New York City. Tatiana, welcome to On Point.

TATIANA CIRISANO: Thank you so much, Amory. Thanks for having me for this really fascinating topic.

SIVERTSON: So what was your initial reaction to the announcement of this tool?

CIRISANO: Yeah, so it’s interesting because I can see how to a fan or sort of to the naked eye, this might have seemed abrupt, but it’s funny, from Midia Research’s perspective, we’ve been studying this phenomenon for actually more than 10 years, of how over time music fans and music audiences have become ever more sort of participatory in music experiences, and this is the latest evolution of that.

So from my perspective, I saw the news and thought, “Oh, this makes sense. This is something that we’ve been predicting for a while,” and it was actually really exciting to see the first announcement made and with the sort of two biggest music companies, arguably in the world at that.

SIVERTSON: And your firm, Midia Research, has surveyed thousands of music consumers in recent years about how they want to participate in the music that they love.

So can you break that down for us a little bit? Who are you surveying? Are is it a particular age range, and what kinds of things are you asking the people you’re surveying to find out what they want to do to music?

CIRISANO: Yeah, of course. So at Midia, we run quarterly surveys that run globally, and we survey 9,000 people around the world in nine different global markets, so 1,000 people per market.

And recently we published a report specifically looking at the 16 to 19-year-old age segment in these surveys which is the youngest segment that we survey. And we asked them a lot of questions about not just what tools specifically they would be interested in on a platform like Spotify, but also just generally their thoughts and attitudes towards what we call remix culture.

So basically, this trend over time where in this era of the age of the creator, new generations increasingly expect the ability to mold the entertainment that they’re fans of and put their own spin on it. So for example, we asked a couple of agree, disagree questions about, how much do you agree with this statement?

And we found that 51% of that 16 to 19-year-old segment in the U.S. agreed that fans should be able to remix and create new versions of art and entertainment that they love. So that sort of is validating that sense of remix culture that I mentioned. And then we also asked specifically about what types of tools they would be interested in.

So we asked a long list of, would you be interested in swapping lyrics in your favorite songs? Adding audio filters, speeding them up or slowing them down. And the sort of headline figure is that 79% were interested in at least one of the audio modification features that we asked about.

And the most popular ones were swapping or sorry, changing the speed of songs, so speeding them up or slowing them down, and then DJ style mix tools, so tools to sort of transition in and out of songs or add effects. And it’s funny because Spotify actually offers that already. So that’s just some of the data that we’ve gathered on the topic.

SIVERTSON: That is fascinating, and remix culture is a new phrase for me that is going to stay with me. So we should say Spotify and Universal Music Group are two of your clients, meaning they pay to access the survey data that Midia Research collects and then can use that data to inform their own business decisions.

Do you think your data is partially responsible for this new partnership and initiative?

CIRISANO: I couldn’t go as far to say so. We do serve with our data, the majority of the leading streaming services and record labels, which we’re really fortunate to have as clients. And we have been studying this for a long time.

But I think the music industry has also been talking about this for a while. Our clients have been asking about this for a while. So I would, I hope that we’ve helped illuminate or validate that there’s demand for this among younger music fans.

But yeah I couldn’t go as far as to say that we’re responsible.

SIVERTSON: Okay. Yeah, there’s demand for this, and this is already happening, whether people are, artists are being paid for their music to be mashed up and remixed or not. And I want to play an example for people who have heard me say, “Do you want to hear so-and-so cover this or mash up this and that?”

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner wrote an article earlier this month on AI-generated music, and in his research, he discovered massive data sets on songs that AI companies are being trained on to create AI-generated music, 21 million songs, resulting in new creations like this one.

(SONG PLAYS)

SIVERTSON: Okay, so this was made using Suno, an AI music company, and the prompt for this creation was post-disco, pop rock, funk, electronic, R&B, thriller, Motown, famous male singer and dancer, King of Pop falsetto.

So this, as I said, this is a technology that already exists. Suno is free to use. Why, Tatiana, do you think Spotify wanted to be able to offer a tool to its users that would allow them to remix, mash up, cover songs like this?

CIRISANO: Yeah, there’s a lot of reasons. I think that streaming services, Spotify included, have started to think of, first of all, really any other digital entertainment platform as a competitor.

It’s no longer just streaming competing with streaming or games competing with other games in this sort of attention economy, as we call it, every platform competes with everything else. So I think part of it is a way for Spotify to compete with the time that their users may be spending on platforms like Suno, and it’s also a way to turn something that could be a really big threat to the music industry into an opportunity by putting sort of guardrails around it and figuring out a way for fans to engage in this behavior responsibly.

Because I think the industry has learned its lesson from the Napster era and all these other disruptions that came before it, which is that rather than trying to stop the sort of arc of consumer behavior, it’s better to figure out how to enable it and empower it in ways that benefit everyone and to build those responsible guardrails.

So there’s a lot of interest in doing this for Spotify. I would also add it’s a way to appeal to future generations, right? And ensure that their product continues to be relevant and interesting and engaging for people that are growing up today.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, engaging in this technology responsibly is the sticky wicket of all of this that we’re going to be getting into.

But it also occurs to me that this trend of music lovers wanting to participate in music curation and creation isn’t new, right?

CIRISANO: No, not at all. It goes back to the ’70s or ’80s if you really think about it. You used to only be able to listen to music in the order it was given to you on a vinyl record.

But then we moved into the era of mixed tapes and then CDs where fans were able to, for the first time, splice different songs from, not only different albums, but entirely different artists into the same place. There’s actually, if you go to YouTube and look up the iconic Apple ad, Rip, Mix, Burn, you’ll see that there was an ad actually telling fans to do this with CDs.

So that’s where this all started, and we’ve ended up at the next natural evolution now.

Part II

SIVERTSON: So Tatiana, you were talking about what users want to do with music. I’m curious, do you know from any of your survey data, do people actually want to listen to mashups and remixes made by other Spotify users? Who’s the audience for these creations?

CIRISANO: That’s a really great question, Amory, because I think that the sort of opportunity here is actually more about the creation aspect and how remixing and modifying entertainment has become almost a form of entertainment in itself for people.

Content creation as not just a means to an end, but something that is enjoyable in its own right. And so my hunch is that it will be less about millions of people listening to the outputs of this feature, and it’s more about the time that people will put into using it. That said, I think that it’s important that there is this sharing ability because ultimately, I think people do expect to share their creations, even if it’s just with their friends or their family.

But my hunch is that this will actually be more of about the creation as the draw rather than the listening on the other end. But to answer your specific question, we haven’t actually asked directly that question, but it’s something that I now would like to ask in our upcoming survey.

SIVERTSON: Okay, there you go. So in its press release for the announcement, Spotify says this new AI tool is built around, quote, “Consent, credit, and compensation for creators,” creators being the musicians who made the original songs that Spotify users would now be remixing and covering. So I wanna take those sort of one by one briefly.

Consent from creators. The deal is with Universal Music Group, but Universal Music Group, but artists represented by UMG still have to opt in to have their music available to this tool. Do we know any more about how that’s going to work?

CIRISANO: We don’t. I don’t. Somebody does, but it’s not something that I’m privy to.

But I will say that this is where it gets really sticky, as you can imagine, because if you go on Spotify and you look at the credits for, say, an Ariana Grande song or a Beyoncé song or whoever your favorite artist is, you might find that it has five different songwriters and two different producers and lots of other collaborators on board.

And you would need permission just for that one song to be included in this Spotify feature, from all of those different collaborators. They would all need to opt in. And not all of them would be signed to Universal, in all likelihood. So it gets complex pretty fast, and I’m not sure, to be honest with you, how that opt-in process is going to be handled.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, it’s also, we heard that Thriller example where you can put whatever you want into a prompt in a tool like Suno, and yet I wonder if there will be guardrails around this. Will there be parameters around, can you really take a Billie Eilish song and swap in Bad Bunny lyrics and then have Ariana Grande’s voice singing it?

Or what parameters can we put around this to properly credit and then ultimately compensate the artists involved?

CIRISANO: Totally. There’s also even been conversations I know about artists who say, like Billie Eilish, for example, pretty sure she’s vegan. Say that somebody goes on the Spotify feature and adds new lyrics that, I know this is ridiculous, but are all about meat and how much they love it.

Is Billie Eilish going to be upset that the fan has put out this song? So there’s even been conversations like that where artists have said. I’m okay with people changing my lyrics in this direction, but not in this other direction. So all of that sort of needs to be figured out, and I will say my hunch is that when this feature does get launched, it will be with a limited catalog to start and that there will be certain guardrails around it.

SIVERTSON: Okay. I want to bring another voice into this conversation because we are joined by an artist, Damon Krukowski, musician and writer, former member of the bands Galaxie 500 and Magic Hour, and now part of the psychedelic folk duo Damon & Naomi, and he’s also the legislative director and AI and streaming expert at the United Musicians and Allied Workers, a national labor group for artists.

Damon Krukowski, welcome to On Point.

DAMON KRUKOWSKI: Thank you so much for inviting me.

SIVERTSON: You’ve been sitting here. You’re in the studio across from me, which is wonderful. I’m curious your thoughts as you’ve heard us talk more about this tool. As a musician yourself, what are your immediate reactions to a tool like this that could potentially take music of yours and remix it?

KRUKOWSKI: What I hear is less about the tool, which sounds very undefined as of yet. Seems like there are no specifics. But what I hear loud and clear is the music industry, the biggest players in the music industry, making decisions that will affect all of us without consulting any of the creators.

Certainly no one I know has been consulted. We don’t have any way to even begin that conversation. We’re not part, we’re not at the table. Who’s at the table? Universal Music, Spotify — the biggest players in the industry, as you very rightly said. And what are they basing it on? Something like Midia Research, which they’re paying for.

They have provided the questions that are being answered by Midia. I don’t hear fans, frankly, actually being consulted. A survey that is restricted to 16 to 19-year-olds asks leading questions is not really, to me, indicative of where, anyway, my fans are. I don’t play for 16 to 19-year-olds.

Pop music does. Universal is concerned with 16 to 19-year-olds, but there’s a world of music outside that. And the problem is that our world of music that is outside that, that is outside Universal’s interest in teenage fans and what they can be led toward spending their time on a platform to do, our world outside that is left without tools, sustainable tools to continue as professionals, and that’s tied into these decisions that are being made without our participation.

SIVERTSON: So Tatiana, I want to give you a chance to respond to that, but first —

CIRISANO: I would love to respond to that.

SIVERTSON: Okay. Staying on this for one more second here, though, Damon. When you hear Spotify say that this tool is built around consent specifically, you say that artists you know and you yourself are not being consulted, labor unions maybe are not being consulted, but the whole idea is that artists would opt in.

What gives you pause around just the notion that, oh I can choose to do this or not choose to do this? It’s not exactly consent around what the tool would look like, but it presumably is a way for you to either jump in or stay out.

KRUKOWSKI: It’s the imbalanced power situation in the industry as it stands.

We’re not given a choice to opt in or out of streaming itself. Streaming now represents 84% of all recorded music revenue in the U.S. So sure, you can opt out and pull your stuff off streaming, but that means you’ve pulled yourself out of all of the marketplace. So if you’re a professional, you actually have no choice.

We also have no choice about the terms that we’re given for streaming platforms. Again, they were negotiated between Universal, Warner, Sony, and Spotify, and all the other players had to follow suit. You’re either in or out. It’s not really an option if you consider your, just think about your own business, whatever you do for your living.

If someone says you can opt out, but you can’t actually work in the field anymore, that’s not an option. So we’re not given, we’re not consulted, we’re not part of the negotiations. We’re just given an in or out, and frankly, if you’re a professional, you must be in.

SIVERTSON: So Tatiana, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and I’m especially curious how what are the considerations for the artists themselves in how you are crafting questions that you might put to people you’re surveying, not just in terms of what users want, music consumers want, but how are you thinking about the artist in the mix?

CIRISANO: Yeah, I think you’ll be glad to hear that in that same survey, the vast majority of the 16 to 19-year-old segment agreed that the original creator should be compensated and should be included in that conversation. So I absolutely feel that the voices of the creator, the creators need to be in the room.

That’s why I was alluding to how sticky this is about to get. But I also just want to respond to a couple of those claims, because just to clarify for anyone listening, Midia has dozens of clients. And we’re a third-party research firm. They don’t decide what questions we put in surveys.

We are an independent research firm. And also it was not just 16 to 19-year-olds surveyed. That was just, I was just giving that cut because I think it’s especially interesting to think about the next generation of consumers. And we do, we’re experts in survey design. We do a lot to make sure that these questions are never leading.

I’m paraphrasing here but if you’re interested in the actual way the question was worded, I can definitely send it along. So just to clarify where our research is coming from and the fact that we are, in fact, a third-party research firm.

SIVERTSON: Damon, Spotify says that this AI tool will, quote, “Open up additional revenue streams for artists on the platform,” because artists whose music is being remixed and covered using the tool … will receive royalties.

That sounds like a good thing on its face particularly considering that there are companies like Suno and Udio out there that are not paying artists. What’s your take on that?

KRUKOWSKI: They’re already not paying artists for streaming of our existing recordings, so I have no trust that they would suddenly start paying us for —

SIVERTSON: Not paying just in that the amount that they are paying maybe is not a meaningful amount. It’s not a —

KRUKOWSKI: No, they actually pay zero directly to recording artists. They have dodged every existing regulation for paying us for our work. On other digital platforms like satellite radio, internet broadcast, even non-intentional streaming like Pandora, we are paid directly for our work by the platform through a nonprofit called SoundExchange.

That’s enacted by a law of Congress in the late ’90s, early 2000s, protecting recording artists from being cut out of the digital distribution. When Spotify entered the U.S. market, they said those laws did not apply to them. They only had to cut private agreements with the rights holders.

That’s the record labels, and that’s what they’ve done. So they pay rights holders too little as it is, but that’s because they gave the major labels ownership shares in Spotify in exchange for a very bad deal for their artists. So the labels have been making billions. Spotify makes billions. The heads of Spotify are among the highest paid people in the music industry.

They’re not music executives; it’s a tech platform that has cut a deal with the biggest copyright holders in the world and left artists out of the picture.

SIVERTSON: Another claim here, and I’m curious for both of your thoughts on this, is that Spotify says this tool is going to offer new ways to drive discovery for artists, presumably referring to those who are looking for more exposure and trying to find their audience.

Damon, is that a compelling argument to you?

KRUKOWSKI: That is an argument made to Spotify stockholders. Spotify leans on what they call a two-sided marketplace. That means they charge both the consumer and the creator for access to one another on the platform. Latest figures I’ve seen is that 75% of the tracks that are getting playlisted now are paid placement from the labels to Spotify.

They have marketing programs. Were they a broadcast organization like WBUR, this would be payola. It’s against the law. Spotify, again, has ducked existing laws and regulations by saying that they’re not a broadcaster, that they’re only cater to active listening, but as anybody using Spotify knows, it’s lean back listening, which is again, one of their objectives if you go into what statements they make for their stockholders.

I point out one more thing about that, which is they made this very vague announcement about these tools that you started the segment with. What the real one result of that day was their stock price went up 16% from the announcement.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, I’ve seen 13 to 15, but it’s in, it’s above 10%.

It was a meaningful jump.

KRUKOWSKI: So in that respect, it’s entirely successful, and you can see what the goal really is. The goal is not about artists. The goal is not about even consumers, I would venture, although I’m not an expert on that. But I think the goal is about their stockholders and about their hold over all the money that’s in the industry flowing to just a few hands, flowing to Spotify, flowing to UMG.

SIVERTSON: So a question that I’ve had in all of this is like who is this for? What artists will really benefit from this? And I do wanna play an example of something that happened during the pandemic. Saint Jhn an American and Guyanese rapper. It’s an artist that a lot of people had not heard of until April of 2020 when his single “Roses” was remixed.

It hit number one on the ARIA charts as well as the UK singles charts. If you missed it, here’s a taste of it.

Okay, so the song Roses actually came out in 2016, four years before that remix, a remix that AI was not involved in, but it didn’t get much traction then. So here’s the original Roses song by Saint Jhn. 

(ROSES PLAYS)

SIVERTSON: Okay, so pretty different. And Tatiana I’m curious for your thoughts on, you know, what the artist, when we think about what the artist might get out of remixes, you take an artist like St. John who does benefit from, “Okay, let’s remix this song. Let’s turn up the tempo.” Suddenly people who might have never heard the song Roses know about it.

It takes off on TikTok. What do you make of this example, and do you think that AI can meaningfully create more Saint Jhn, if you will?

CIRISANO: Certainly I think it’s a way that Saint Jhn and other artists whom this has happened to have been discovered by new listeners.

People then go and check out their back catalog and all that. I will say I think an example of that caliber is like any other success like that in the industry, the equivalent of a lottery ticket. I wouldn’t expect that this feature would lead to that happening to dozens or hundreds of artists.

It will surely happen more often. But I think that the bigger kind of point is to turn that lean back experience that most listeners have on streaming platforms into a more lean forward one and have people engaging more directly with music in that way. And I’ll say I have spoken to artists who at the same time as there’s understandably a lot of trepidation about opening up their music to other people, there’s also artists who have said to me I’d much rather engage with fans that way than make a get ready with me video or become an influencer, all these other ways that I think artists have felt pressured to market themselves.

So it is a way to bring that artist-fan connection back to the actual music itself, which is interesting to me.

SIVERTSON: Damon, we have to take another break here, but briefly, what are your thoughts on remixes as a way for fans to engage with musicians in a new way?

KRUKOWSKI: I think that already exists and I certainly have no objection.

I think that you can go onto, on TikTok they’re constantly slowing down and speeding up and doing whatever, and this just already exists. It’s just that people are not profiting from it. The corporations are not profiting from it directly. So I think what this is all about is a plan to claim that creativity by fans as a profitable activity for the platforms and the major labels.

So it’s just another claim for activity that’s already there, creative action, but not rewarding the actual creators with the finances.

Part III

SIVERTSON: I want to bring another voice into this conversation now, Chris Wares. He’s a professor and assistant chair of music business management at Berklee College of Music.

He’s worked as an artist manager, a copyright administrator, a distribution specialist, working with some of the largest independent record labels and management companies. Chris Wares, welcome to On Point.

CHRIS WARES: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

SIVERTSON: It’s great to have you here. Now, you’ve been sitting across the table from me.

I’m sure that you’ve been hearing a lot of things that have made you go, “Ooh, ooh- Biting my lip. … ooh,” biting your lip. So now is the moment when you can unleash a little bit of that. I’m dying to know what your reaction as someone who works in the music industry, has for a long time, and now teaches music industry leaders of the future, what does a tool like this mean for music?

WARES: So I will say it depends. I heard the comment from Spotify about this being the Wild West, but we’re not quite sure what this is actually going to mean for musicians and artists, and whether or not there’s going to be meaningful value.

It’s really all going to depend on the deal terms, the transparency, the control that artists are going to have around consent, but beyond the simple consent for opting in, the control around how their voice, their image and likeness are going to be used, and whether or not there is actually going to be meaningful value back to those creators and rights holders.

And by value, I don’t necessarily just mean compensation. That’s an important piece, financial compensation. But also, how are they maybe finding new and creative ways to engage super fans, to have that participatory music creation, to engage with those fans in new and fun ways.

SIVERTSON: Okay. So you’ve highlighted some of the maybe not concerns, at least things to think about when developing this tool. What do you see as some of the potential positives of a tool like this that could maybe allow fans to be more participatory in the music?

WARES: So I’ve always been an advocate for innovation and iteration, shall I say. And a licensed opt-in model is definitely going to be better than unauthorized uses.

The question then becomes how do we put those responsible ethical guardrails around that? How do we ensure that the, let’s say, emerging artists understand what rights they’re giving away, understand how to build some of these relationships with their fans, and what this is actually going to mean?

I do agree with what Tatiana was mentioning earlier and she can jump in on this too, but I don’t quite see a huge market for these AI generated remixes, but I do see there being more of a market for fan participation, a closer relationship to develop with those artists.

SIVERTSON: Okay. On this innovation piece, I wanna hear a little bit from the CEO and co-founder of Suno, one of these AI music platforms.

His name’s Mikey Shulman and this is from a Billboard interview that he did about the future of AI in music.

MIKEY SHULMAN: Users want to do more things with music than they can do right now, and we are in the business of trying to delight users with new things that they can do with music. And if we don’t give people new things, they’re not gonna get to do new things, they’re not gonna wanna pay more money for these new experiences, and we will not actually be able to move forward, grow the music economy.

And I think in general, I understand that music and technology have a checkered past but too much inhibition of innovation ultimately keeps things a lot smaller than they ought to be.

SIVERTSON: So Chris I want to hear your thoughts twofold on this. One is you are a music business management professor, assistant chair at Berklee, but also Berklee is a thriving creative environment where people might hear something like this and go, “But this is not how we innovate.

This is not how we inspire creativity.” So how do you balance like the technological side of music innovation and music innovation that just comes from the creative spirit?

WARES: So as you mentioned, there’s been so many disruptions over the years, and at Berklee, our values around this are always going to be artist-centric with human expression at the center.

Our core music courses, our core songwriting courses, are all based on human expression. The craftsmanship, the musicianship, but we also have a moral responsibility to prepare our artists, to prepare our students for what is out there. And in that, empower them through education to make decisions based on their values, but also to better understand their rights, to better understand how these technologies are going to impact music, and to shape the future of the industry, the next generation, to come up with creative solutions, innovative solutions that are artist-centric, fair, responsible.

SIVERTSON: Damon, your thoughts on what we just heard from Mikey Shulman of Suno that listeners want to be able to do this, fans want to be able to do this. We are trying to give them what they want. How do you think about that as an artist who maybe wants to give fans what they want, but has other, is weighing other interests here?

KRUKOWSKI: What strikes me is that you know who trusts fans is artists. We trust our fans. I had no problem with Napster either. Sharing was not a bad thing. Sharing our music was a beautiful thing. And when I hear these corporate heads like Mikey Shulman say these things like, “Oh, users want this, users want that,” what I hear is them saying, is not the relationship between artist and fan at all. I hear them manipulating users, manipulating fans.

They want to shape what the fan experience must be or shall be in order to create profit for those companies.

That’s what Spotify, for example, has done, moving from, they claim there was a library model, you could listen to anything you want, to you go on and they manipulate the user to listen to what they want you to listen to, or what they’ve been paid to listen, paid to get you to listen to.

And that kind of manipulation is what I think is at the heart, manipulation of users, of fans as well as of artists and as well as of labels, and I think that’s the tech platform default, as we all know from all parts of our lives and in our engagements with tech.

SIVERTSON: Tatiana, I wanna get your thoughts on that.

We’re hearing Damon say the platforms say users want this, users want that. What do you hear in what Mikey Schulman of Suno just said as someone who does hear from users about what they do want?

CIRISANO: Yeah, so I think one kind of important bit of nuance that we haven’t really touched on here is that we don’t really expect this to be a mainstream product, at least not yet.

This isn’t something that overnight we think all Spotify users are going to be interested and ready and wanting to use this. It’s actually more of an overlap with super fans. So when we look at, in our consumer surveys, which again, we’re surveying 9,000 people around the world, pretty strong sample size, we find that there’s a lot of overlap between the biggest fans of music and the people who are interested in these types of features, and that makes sense, right?

Because the biggest music fans are often the most likely to also make music, to play an instrument, to sing, to love karaoke, to be creative with music in some way. So we see this ultimately as more of a feature for music super fans than for sort of mainstream consumers.

SIVERTSON: That’s so interesting, and as you’re talking about, the fans that want to use this tool might also be fans who make music themselves.

I wanna hear from one of our On Point listeners. This is Matthew Smith of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who questions Spotify’s premise that this new AI tool is really about offering more creative power for the listener.

MATTHEW SMITH: While they claim that it’s to get people involved in the creative process, as a musician myself, I feel like that’s a false connection between the use of AI and then the actual creative process, which involves hours and hours of testing and writing and putting in all this mental effort, and you’re disguising AI as a creative process, which in my opinion … it’s a bit of a fallacy.

Chris Wares, I’d love your thoughts on that.

WARES: There’s a couple of things. And creativity is an interesting word and how we define creativity and how we define AI. I love the definition of creativity around something that is surprising and something that is different and unique.

And a lot of AI, what we know to be AI, is actually just machine learning that trains on data sets, looks for patterns, and then generates something based on those patterns. And so it has a very sort of specific aesthetic, and then a lot of people call it AI slop, or it’s just very recognizable, and it’s not considered creative because it lacks that surprising, that unique element of that authentic human expression.

And there’s one piece around what then is that creativity, that creative process? But I do wanna add another layer. I love that Tatiana was mentioning this part about nuance. I’ve done some anecdotal. I deal with high school students, I deal with university students, and I’ve had — we’ve had these beautiful discussions around what a tool like this would look like.

Would they engage with it? And most of the students that I engage with are musicians and artists, and we see all the different sides of the spectrum. Some are vehemently opposed. They would never want to engage with these AI tools. Some are really interested. They’re super fans of certain artists, and they can’t wait to get their hands on these.

And so what I think this is doing is creating this, I tend to be an optimist, but this beautiful conversation, this debate around, okay how are we integrating these? Can we create these safe spaces to engage with these tools, to have these closer relationships with artists? And this is where education really has to come into play.

This is why it’s so important. The users as well as the creators, the original artists, they need to understand what does it mean, what does consent actually look like, and then how do you protect your rights beyond just the music rights, but also your name, image, likeness, and voice and what are these responsible and new and creative ways?

Again, we don’t know all the details. This is a step in a direction of, okay, there’s a lot of unlicensed, unauthorized music being generated. Now let’s move towards models that we can iterate and build upon.

SIVERTSON: And, we should say, Berklee does offer courses in using AI in music composition and production, and the school has faced pushback from musicians and from students for that. Is there a guiding light that you would ask your students or want your students to think about in terms of the role that AI could play in the music industry?

WARES: Absolutely. Again, Berklee’s core music curriculum, the songwriting curriculum, there is no forced AI content. We do have some electives for students who want that choice to say, “Oh, I’m interested in this. How can I do this?” At the core, we are artist-centric. It’s all about consent, attribution, and the guiding light is we are here to show you and educate you. And there’s an important actually piece here not to get conflated education with endorsement. That often gets confused, or this is a gray area.

Our education is we are empowering you to understand your rights. We are empowering you to understand what are the tools that are out there, and we are also giving them the choice to say, “Do you want to engage with this or not?”

SIVERTSON: Okay, so Damon, turning it back to you, Spotify use phrases like advancing AI responsibly, and they frame this new initiative as a groundbreaking responsible AI tool.

What does responsible AI in the music industry look like for you as someone who represents artists and is an artist yourself?

KRUKOWSKI: To me, it’s not about the technology. I don’t think that any of us — we’ve polled our members at UMAW, United Musicians and Allied Workers, and we’re not taking a position on the technology.

First of all, there’s no reason to do that. Technology happens. Everybody adapts. It will be used for good and bad and creatively and not creatively in all various ways. To me, it’s more about how is this technology being used by those in power to increase their power and belittle the power of, its capital is using it to belittle labor.

That’s really what we’re looking at, just like in everything else. So I don’t think that, I don’t trust these corporations to use anything responsibly. They’ve proven themselves to be irresponsible about the future of the music industry, about sustainable careers for actual working artists.

And so I would, I do trust my fans, though. I trust all our fans. Unauthorized use is, to me, is not a threat. It’s use that’s been corralled into a power structure where all money drains to the top. That’s what worries me way more. I would point out one more thing that Mikey Shulman, from that same article that you quoted from in Billboard.

Billboard pointed out that in their own deck that they showed to investors, Suno is responsible now for seven million songs a day. Their software is creating seven million songs a day. That’s not for super fans. That’s the kind of scale that we’re familiar with from the internet businesses, technology businesses, where it’s just take no prisoners.

We’re gonna flood the market, and we’re gonna control it.

SIVERTSON: Chris Wares, we’re quickly running out of time here, but, as Damon says, the vast majority of people are listening to, are streaming their music. They’re using platforms like this, and this new AI tool exists because things like Suno exist.

There’s money to be made and artists to be paid. What if this sort of innovation is inevitable, what can artists do and labels do to make sure that their interests are properly taken into account?

WARES: Education. Don’t panic. Take the time to learn. And also, the labels I share many of the similar concerns that Damon was just mentioning.

The labels should definitely consider the independent artists and make sure that they ensure that they have a seat at the table through unions, through collaboration. I will say that the piece around the seven million songs, the hundreds of thousands of songs being uploaded every single day, there are other guardrails that also need to be in place from the DSPs like Spotify to identify and properly attribute what is AI and what is not.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.