AI-generated music is appealing to streaming services, not least because it could potentially eliminate royalty payments and boost profits. While providers such as Qobuz are distancing themselves from AI-generated music, Tidal and Spotify already have very lax AI policies. According to a report by the Financial Times, Spotify is now planning a full-scale AI push, set to launch as early as the first quarter of 2027.
The streaming market leader is apparently adding an optional AI package to its Spotify Premium subscription, reportedly costing $4 to $5 per month, which could make the service’s Premium subscription up to 39 percent more expensive. Those willing to pay these additional costs are expected to receive two main new features. First, the ability to have artificial intelligence regenerate existing songs as remixes. And second, the option to generate any song as a cover version by any band, thereby changing the song’s style.
The moment they do that, I’m bailing.
I’ve seen the writing on the wall for a long time, even if not this outcome exactly, that Spotify will only keep tightening its profit driven screws whilst loosening paying customers QOL experience.
Therefore, I’ve been slowly building up a vinyl collection over the past 15 months or so.
By the time this deadline comes around, I’ll have more than enough physical media to give a shit about what Spotify’s doing anymore.
I’ve also got a reasonably extensive library of flac/VBR .mp3’s.
The only reason I’m subscribed, is to to find new artists/bands that I like. Then I purchase physical media of their work.
Due to a lot of them being internationally based, I rarely purchase through bandcamp, because their shipping costs internationally are ridiculous.
I quit Spotify when they signed Rogan, but I remember its early days fondly - it used to have a free and open API. You could get visualisers, lyrics, BPM analysers for DJs, Last.fm integration… what a prime example of rampant enshittification.
Me looking at this information with my 1500+ files music collection and my media player: “Spotify? What’s a Spotify?”
Anyone know of Spotify alternatives that have family plans? I have like 4 other people on my plan and I don’t want them to get fucked over if I decide to switch. It’s the one subscription that I cover in exchange for others paying for other subscriptions that we share.
Qobuz has a family plan, and it’s cheaper than Spotify’s, at least in Canada.
/me waiting for the additional charge on top of that they’ll offer in exchange to flick a “no AI” switch.
Cackles maniacally in Plex lifetime pass and self hosting
Why would you pay for AI generated music, surely that has less value to people?
Like I don’t even totally hate the existence of AI generated music. But it isn’t worth anything to me. I can prompt it in seconds. If I wanted some kind of background music generator it would work for that, but I don’t see how that is worth any non zero amount of money.
Incredible they got this far with that shitty app.
Exactly. I’m using a fork, which is AI-generated, but still way better and lighter than the original client: https://spotifast.rocks/
They need to make this provider agnostic somehow. That would be amazing.
I didn’t get it. Imagine the sales pitch here.
“Yeah we are going to make your subscription more expensive, but you’ll get more slop in return!”
Why?!
The article lays it out pretty clearly on why if you read it.
It is unclear how these AI-generated songs will affect the royalties Spotify pays to artists. The company is reportedly already negotiating with record labels, but how high or low the payments to artists will ultimately be is not yet known. Spotify is also reportedly struggling to persuade some artists to agree to the use of their music by AI. According to an analyst quoted by the Financial Times, around 8 percent of all Spotify subscribers could be paying this surcharge for AI-generated songs by the end of 2028.
Money, it’s always money.
Because execs have no clue what users want and live in a parallel world in which people want what execs wish people wanted.
Then they’ll be baffled by the low take on their offer and their next step will be to force-enroll existing users on a free trial that won’t stop by itself, hoping some of them will just let it run and get milked.
They have to. This is actually good news. It shows they are losing revenue and are desperate. If you still use Spotify that’s on you.
Because a lot of people don’t care or even like this stuff.
So they will pay more for it, right? Right?
“Ai efficiencies will be passed on to the customer!”
Remember this next time billionaires say they’ll happily pay onto UBI or whatever.
I’ve never spent a dime on music
Unless your music taste is made up of bland faceless corporate pop, I urge you to reconsider and support your favorite musicians.
Would visiting concerts count for that?
Excellent starter. Nowadays even legendary but non mainstream bands can only survive by touring and selling merch directly. Making money off records is viable only to artists who sell millions upon millions of copies
Still, find a direct way to buy a cd, vinyl, mc from that band. Show them you care.
Tidal has been pretty good, I switched a few years ago
I went from Tidal to Apple. They’re both fine. The main takeaway is when you switch platform it takes a number of months before the recommendation algorithm becomes useful. But there’s tools you can use to jump between providers, it’s less hard than most people think.
This would get me onto Qobuz at least.
I think I might continue using it for music discovery only. For everything else music-related: https://mornye.com/ (mobile and desktop, pulls audio and metadata from multiple providers, rips FLAC and populates metadata, builtin player, syncs library across devices).
Of course, if an artist has bandcamp and I can buy singles I want, I’ll continue doing that as well.
I already switched to Symfonium which streams my digital music library. Not ideal for discovering new music but its been working for me!
Time to violate their ToS again and download my Spotify library to my hard drive outside their app. Might switch to Qobuz permanently this time.
That is just awful and I would never, ever do that to a poor corporation. In fact, I would love if you could share the steps to do this so that I can avoid accidentally downloading my Spotify library to my own hard drive outside their app.
Well, if some sort of evil pirate were to dare to do such a thing, they could use a piece of software called AudiCable to do so. Spotify will know if such a person were to do it, so if this evildoer didn’t want to be caught, they might want to download their Spotify library and save it within the app first, then turn off their internet connection and use AudiCable, then perhaps uninstall Spotify so it can’t phone home and report the ToS violation.
Yaharrr 🏴☠️
