- French streaming service Qobuz is introducing tags to denote AI-slop music
- The firm also shared stats on how many people engage with this kind of audio
- Meanwhile, Spotify wants you to use its new AI agent to listen to music
When AI-made music is covered in the media, it’s often painted to be an insidious success story; reports on artists including Velvet Sundown, Breaking Rust and Enlly Blue invariably mention high stream numbers, along with huge estimated revenues. If that rightly frustrates you, know that the problem is occasionally with the reporting, and not with AI music being popular.
French streaming service Qobuz has never been backwards about coming forwards when tackling what Managing Director Dan Mackta refused to call music at all, when we spoke to him earlier in the year. And now, Qobuz has unveiled a feature which adds tags to music it detects was generated with AI. This goes further than Spotify’s opt-in AI persona label, by highlighting real artists’ slop tracks. So expect to see it on Dr. Dre’s new music, for example.
This continues a run of anti-AI moves from streaming services such as Qobuz, Deezer and Tidal, which have all identified sentiment to slop at being overwhelmingly negative. Highlights include Tidal giving no royalties to AI music, and Deezer adding a filter to remove AI tracks.
The major outlier is Spotify, which has made small steps to combat AI music, but some steps backwards too. Recently, it teamed up with Meta’s AI agent Muse (no, not the Plug In Baby band, the chatbot that Meta kicked the band off its social handles for). This partnership lets you… queue up music, give voice commands to control your playlists, create playlists, and set up playing schedules. How did we cope before AI?
Time to decide whether you want Muse (band), or Muse (Meta)?
But perhaps the war against AI is all for naught? Because when unveiling its new AI tag system, Qobuz also shared some statistics on this kind of ‘music’ (word used lightly), which recontextualize the whole thing.
Case in point: apparently only 0.38% of streams on Qobuz are from AI-generated tracks. Yes, less than half a percent. For every 263 streams, only one comes from an AI track. If all the streams were represented by the population of the US, team AI would just about fill up Dallas.
There’s more: over a third of all AI albums receive not a single listen. Not even from their creator. That’s about four million songs, apparently, all of which are created just to take up space (and have been removed from Qobuz’s library, so if you missed them, it’s too late).
And if that wasn’t enough, apparently 60% of all AI-music is demonetized by Qobuz’s anti-fraud systems. This is based on the brand’s AI Charter, unveiled in February, which detects AI music created solely for financial gain.
Qobuz is the original hi-res music service and as the connoisseurs’ choice (devoid of many extra AI add-ons), one could argue that very few users are hitting up Qobuz for AI tracks, but still, the figures are telling. According to these Qobuz stats, you’re largely all avoiding AI slop — well done you, take a pat on the back — and sticking to real music made by real people. Well, mostly. Looking at you, 0.38%…
