Spotify’s Daniel Ek Praises AI’s Potential to Boost Music Creation – And the Company’s Bottom Line

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said Tuesday (April 25) that, contrary to the widespread backlash artificial intelligence (AI) tools have faced, he’s optimistic the technology could actually be a good thing for musicians and for Spotify.

While acknowledging the copyright infringement concerns presented by songs like the AI-generated Drake fake “Heart on My Sleeve” — which racked up 600,000 streams on Spotify before the platform took it down — in comments made on a Spotify conference call and podcast, Ek said AI tools could ease the learning curve for first-time music creators and spark a new era of artistic expression.

“On the positive side, this could be potentially huge for creativity,” Ek said on a conference call discussing the company’s first-quarter earnings. “That should lead to more music [which] we think is great culturally, but it also benefits Spotify because the more creators we have on our service the better it is and the more opportunity we have to grow engagement and revenue.”

Ek’s entrepreneurial confidence that AI can be an industry boon in certain instances stands in contrast to a steady campaign of condemnation for generative machine learning tools coming from Universal Music Group, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and others.

At the same time, companies including Spotify, Warner Music Group, HYBE, ByteDance, SoundCloud and a host of start-ups have leaned in on the potential of AI, investing or partnering with machine learning companies.

The industry is still sorting the ways in which AI can be used and attempting to delineate between AI tools that are helpful and those that are potentially harmful. The use case presenting the most consternation uses a machine-learning process to identify patterns and characteristics in songs that make them irresistible and reproduce those patterns and characteristics in new creations.

Functional music — i.e., sounds designed to promote sleep, studying or relaxation — has become a fertile genre for AI, and playlists featuring AI-enhanced or generated music have racked up millions of followers on Spotify and other streaming services. This has led to concerns by some record executives who have noted that functional music eats into major-label market share.

For Spotify’s part, in February the platform Spotify launched an “AI DJ,” which uses AI technology to gin up song recommendations for premium subscribers based on their listening history, narrated by commentary delivered by an AI voice platform. 

“I’m very familiar with the scary parts … the complete generative stuff or even the so-called deep fakes that pretend to be someone they’re not,” Ek said on Tuesday’s episode of Spotify’s For the Record podcast. “I choose to look at the glass as more half-full than half-empty. I think if it’s done right, these AIs will be incorporated into almost every product suite to enable creativity to be available to many more people around the world.”