- Apple Music’s Oliver Schusser says a third of uploads are generated by AI
- Despite this, only 0.5% of all users interact with this content.
- Apple Music has plans to further combat the AI epidemic
Apple Music has become the latest music streaming service to be hit by the influx of AI-generated content, says its vice president Oliver Schusser, but it is reaching only a very small percentage of all users.
Speaking with Billboard ($/£), Schusser shed light on the state of AI music in the Apple Music library, sharing that “more than a third of what (Apple Music) gets today is actually what we would say is 100% AI.”
This shows that it’s getting easier for labels and distributors to ship music made entirely with artificial intelligence, and Apple Music isn’t the only service facing this epidemic. Last week, Deezer stated that almost half of the new music submitted to the platform is generated by AI, resulting in the company’s decision to stop offering high-resolution versions of these songs.
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So how does Apple plan to put out the AI fire? Well, Schusser went into more detail in his interview. “We’ve never talked about this, but we’ve developed technology internally that would allow us to see exactly what music people are giving us, what AI (model) it is and all that,” he reveals, probably referring to Transparency Tags.
In March, Apple sent a letter to industry partners revealing its plans to implement ‘Transparency Tags’, a new metadata system to help mark AI-generated and assisted music. This means that labels and distributors can reveal whether AI has been used in the production of a song when submitting it to Apple Music. Although it’s optional, Schusser made it clear that he “really needs content providers and labels to take responsibility.”
There’s no denying that fully AI-generated music is showing up on top music streaming services, but Schusser revealed an interesting statistic that may surprise you: Despite the increase, it’s not having a huge impact on users’ listening and engagement habits. “The reality is that AI music usage on Apple Music is really small. I’m rounding, but it’s under 0.5% of usage. We’re just at the beginning,” he told Billboard, but fraud is still rife.
This is another issue that Apple Music is clamping down on, but it’s been doing so since the good old days of iTunes: “This has been a 20-year journey because obviously there was already fraud on iTunes,” Schusser said, leading to the introduction of Apple’s fraud penalty. The company also doubled this penalty starting this year.
But the battle is not over, as Schusser says: “We invest much more than anyone else in reducing and eliminating fraud. We implemented a fraud penalty four years ago, where if we catch someone, we take the money and put it back into the pool. We need to monitor AI music because there is a correlation between AI and fraud.” He also shared that Apple has seen a “60% reduction” in fraudulent uploads after implementing the penalty.
As it is, I’ve been one of the lucky ones not to have come across AI-generated music flooding my recommendations on Apple Music and Spotify, although the latter has come under significant scrutiny for harboring AI waste. Like other platforms, Spotify is also working to protect users by removing 25 million AI tracks in the last 12 months and designing a robust AI combat strategy for the future.
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