Should Streaming Services Ban AI? Link Drop
A round-up of the most important stories in music right now
Before we get to stories about Spotify price increases, Bob Weir, and Beyoncé making a midwest emo song, I wanted to highlight how it’s a been a few exciting weeks for my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves.
My publisher listed it as one of their “hottest” non-fiction books. An editor at The New York Post, picked it as one of his favorite books of 2025. The Economist also gave it a glowing review, which resulted in a chart from the book going viral. Grab a copy of the book if you still haven’t.
Should Streaming Services Ban AI?
Over the last few months, we’ve seen many music companies role out policies around AI-generated music. Spotify added impersonation and disclosure rules. iHeartMedia rolled out their “Guaranteed Human” tagline, meaning they will never use AI-powered radio personalities or AI-generated music. And just last week Bandcamp noted, “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted” on the platform.
I’ve written extensively in this newsletter about how I feel about the fast-evolving world of AI and music. I won’t reiterate my views now, but I do want to comment on these policies, especially those focusing on outright bans.
I think it’s good streaming services are trying to outline how they will deal with AI-generated music. This technology will quickly overrun streaming services if we don’t think about how to address it. Deezer, for example, claimed in November that there were 50,000 AI-generated tracks being uploaded to their platform daily. This number will only grow as people use AI as a tool to defraud royalty systems.
That said, things in this area are much less cut and dry than the policies indicate. First, it is still tremendously difficult to identify fully AI-generated songs at scale. Second, even if we did build that technology, it would probably struggle to identify narrower uses of AI.
