According to the Financial Times, Spotify has taken down tens of thousands of songs that were generated by AI startup Boomy. The service enables users to create music in various styles such as rap and lo-fi and release it to streaming platforms to earn royalties. Although Boomy claims that it has produced 14.5 million songs, equivalent to 14% of the world’s recorded music, it has only been launched publicly this year.
The reason for the removal of the tracks was that the number of streams had been artificially boosted, said Spotify. The company explained that Universal Music had informed all major streaming platforms of suspicious activity on Boomy songs, which suggested that bots had been used to inflate audience statistics. As a result, Spotify took down about 7% of Boomy’s uploaded tracks.
Spotify has been working to eradicate the issue of artificial streaming, which is an industry-wide problem. In a statement to Insider, the company said that they mitigate the impact of stream manipulation cases by taking action such as withholding royalties and removing streaming numbers. This allows them to safeguard royalty payouts for honest and hardworking artists. Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, had previously stated that the music industry had valid concerns about AI-generated songs. Spotify aims to protect creators while still allowing innovation on its platform.
