AI-generated music steals listeners and profits from real artists

Spotify, Apple Music, and other music services once seemed like a lifesaver for musicians. No more begging radio stations for airplay or hoping for the goodwill of a producer. But the reality of the digital platform turned out to be harsher: artists get crumbs for millions of plays, and now they are also being pushed out by artificial intelligence.

Now that generative AI models have learned how to churn out bit after bit, streaming services are beginning to drown in music spam. It’s not about the creative use of technology, but about thousands of soulless tracks that clog up recommendations and deprive real musicians of any chance of attention.

How to describes Pitchfork journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds, lo-fi, a dreamy, unobtrusive style that emerged in the 2010s and gained immense popularity thanks to YouTube streams featuring anime girls, has been particularly affected. Once upon a time, it was a warm online community of musicians, listeners, and enthusiasts who shared their experiences and tracks on Discord and social media.

Now it’s all flooded with «bitspam» — thousands of tracks generated by AI. Many real artists not only lose royalties and contracts, but can’t even tell if a track was created by a live author or a neural network. Some simply give up and leave the platform. Musician Mia Eden says:

Alex Reade, an artist from the UK, performs under the name Project AER. His Spotify had 2 million listeners per month. Now it’s less than 500 thousand.

At the same time, 2 million streams yield approximately $7600, excluding the cost of creating music. That is, all of his income has literally melted away because algorithms like machine AI creations more than a real emotional product. Either the problem is that AI generates music hundreds of times faster than a composer, and the platforms are simply overwhelmed with «bitspam», while the size of the audience hardly changes.

And this is not just a lo-fi problem. This week, social media exploded because of a new «indie band» The Velvet Sundown, which has more than 750 thousand listeners a month. But there is not a single live person behind the project. Everything — from photos to songs — has clear traces of generative AI.

The titles of the songs are suspiciously similar to well-known hits, such as Dust on the Wind, which clearly alludes to the legendary Dust in the Wind by Kansas. And the band’s name itself sounds too close to The Velvet Underground — quite possibly, it’s a calculation for confusion in the search. And Spotify does indeed rank Sundown above Underground in its results. At first, the authors denied everything, but then admitted that it was an AI experiment.

One might think that this is a new musical evolution, if not for one thing: real musicians are being pushed off the stage. And the flow of bits to make money — this is not an experiment, but a cold calculation.

The irony is that only tech executives – the very ones who benefit the most from this digital noise – can stop the wave of bots.

So, while generative music multiplies like mushrooms after rain, real artists are left with a smaller and smaller stage. And while for the listener it’s just another lo-fi track in the playlist, for someone it’s the last nail in the coffin.