Spotify executive says “there is no dilution of the royalty pool by AI music”

As the music industry wrestles with the impact of generative AI, Spotify appears to be taking a measured – and some might say, permissive – approach.

The streaming giant hosted an ‘Open House’ event for journalists at its Stockholm headquarters last week, where executives fielded questions about the platform’s evolving strategy surrounding artificial intelligence.

While some of its rivals, such as Deezer, have been purging AI-generated songs from their platforms, Spotify’s tone was noticeably less adversarial.

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“This is the early days of creativity [with AI’s help],” says CEO Daniel Ek [via Music Ally]. “We want more humans to make it as artists and creators, but what is creativity in the future with AI? I don’t know. What is music anyway?”

The executive compares the rise of generative audio tools to new developments in AI-generated video, referencing Google’s recently announced Veo model.

“You can now generate full-on videos entirely like that. But can’t you express a vision like that and create a really cool animated series? And does that mean you’re a lesser artist than someone who hand-drew all of these things yourself?” Ek questions, adding that society at large will “have to wrestle with these types of issues”.

On the business side, Spotify’s head of artist and industry partnerships Bryan Johnson suggests that the impact of AI-generated tracks on payouts to human artists is minimal.

“[There is] infinitely small consumption of fully AI-generated tracks on Spotify”, Johnson says, insisting that “there is no dilution of the royalty pool by AI music.”

Speaking instead about the opportunities AI offers, CPO and co-president Gustav Söderström says, “We’re excited about GenAI because it gives us English language input for the first time… It’s now not just clicks on streams.”

He goes on to predict a future where AI-powered prompts and spoken requests will be the primary way users find and consume music.

Last week’s event also sees Spotify addressing questions about a potential subscription price hike. On this, Christian Luiga, Spotify’s Chief Financial Officer says, “The day we start to compromise on the value-to-price ratio… then we are going in a totally different direction. We don’t even want to think about that day, because that’s not part of our DNA.”

“Increasing prices, then losing 10% of subscribers is not worth it for us, because that’s not our strategy. We don’t even discuss those things in our management team.”

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