Speaker 1: I did as promised. I wanted to talk about some news.
You know, we mentioned band Camp on the show earlier.
Speaker 2: Band Camp.
Speaker 1: Two things that come up a lot on the show
band Camp the website of course, bandcamp dot com, and
AI and how AI is affecting how music is made, generated,
consumed in the music industry. And band Camp has now
banned AI generated music. They have made it official saying
that they want musicians to keep making music. And you know,
we've got kind of a point counterpoint on this to
look at. But first, this is from Music Businessworldwide dot com.
And this just happened, by the way. They just announced
this ban a couple days ago. According to this website
direct tofan platform, band Camp said it will ban artificial
intelligence generated music and audio from its platform, including any
use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles.
The company made the announcement in a post on Wednesday,
January fourteen.
Speaker 2: So this just happened. Like I said a few days ago.
Speaker 1: Quote, something that always strikes us as we put together
a round up like this is the sheer quantity of
human creativity and passion that artists express on band Camp
every single day. The fact that band Camp is home
to such a vibrant community of real people making incredible
music is something we want to protect and maintain unquote.
And by the way, and this came up during our
conversation with Adam steglitic have ever felt in the second hour,
I think what we talked about with Adam, it was
either with Adam or with Grimrock.
Speaker 2: No, I think it was with Adam. We were talking
about how band Camp.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons that I'm such a proponent of
it is if you get your music files from band Camp,
You're getting a high quality music file, much higher quality
than say if you're just streaming it on YouTube or
something like that. So just something to be aware of too.
Band Camp is really good that way, it says here again.
According to this article, band Camp said music and audio
that has created quote holly or in substantial part by
AI unquote will no longer be allowed on the platform.
The company will also enforce existing policies against any use
of AI tools to copy other artists or styles. The
company said, quote, we want musicians to keep making music
and for fans have confidence that the music they find
on band Camp was created by humans unquote. This has
come up several times. Like I said, over the past
couple of years. You know, Jenny and I talk about
this all the time on the show, the effect of
AI in the music industry and in the creation of music.
Speaker 2: And there are some tools like.
Speaker 1: Pseudo dot com, which we've experimented with live on the show,
that they can make some really realistic sounding, you know,
music that sounds like it was made by humans, entirely
by humans. One thing that look, it's any platform has
the right, whether it's band Camp, whether it's YouTube, whomever.
As frustrating as it can be at times, any platform
has a right to police and control what the content is,
in this case music, when we talk about band Camp,
what the content is it is being uploaded to their platform. However,
I really worry with policies like this that because it's
going to happen, it's inevitable. I guess it's an extent
it's impossible to prevent this. So it comes down to
an extent to which it ends up happening. Artists are
going to get caught in the net. And I don't
mean net as an internet, I mean net as in
like a fishing net. Artists are going to get caught
in the net where whatever software band Camp is using
to detect AI generated music, there are going to be
artists who are flagged by band Camp as being AI generated,
who in fact are not AI generated.
Speaker 2: It's going to happen. It's unavoidable. Okay.
Speaker 1: So I'm not saying that because that's going to happen,
that band Camp should not do this. I'm not saying that.
But what I am expressing is a concern that what
if it happens a lot. Because anybody who's ever created
anything that you've then put on the Internet for mass consumption,
whether it's music, whether it's a podcast, doing a radio
show that you know, in addition to being live on
FM radio also streams online. Anybody who's ever created anything
knows that sometimes you can get flagged, you can get tagged,
you can get dinged for something by these platforms that
is in fact, uh not correct, and you're getting blamed
for something that you didn't necessarily do you know. Look,
I've been on YouTube for a very long time. You know,
it hasn't happened in a long time, but I have
in the past. More so when I was doing a
lot more political content, I would get I would get
dinged by YouTube for things. So you can't say this,
you can't talk about that. You've got to strike on
your account now because you said this, you repeated this,
and this is not accurate. You can't do that, you know.
And most of the time, not to sound like I'm
shirking responsibility, but most of the time it's like, wait
a minute, that's not what I said. They're flagging me
for I was quoting something somebody else said that wasn't
my opinion. Why are they Why am I being penalized
for repeating what somebody else said and making it clear?
But see, you know what happens is right there is
these the bots. They it's all it's AI. See, that's
the thing. They use AI to detect AI. That's what
band camp is going to be doing here. They're going
to use AI to detect when there's AI and AI.
Speaker 2: The AI that.
Speaker 1: They're using to detect whether or not they there's AI
is not going to get it right every time, especially
when because this is a little broad when they say
band camp, okay, band Camp said music and audio that
is created holly or in substantial part by AI. Listen
any any recording studio you know that that is modern
is probably you know, probably has software in their computers
in that recording.
Speaker 2: Studio that use AI to fix things, to tweak things.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's so ingrained in everything, and it really
has been with us for you know, some people act like, oh,
AI it's this new thing.
Speaker 2: It's not.
Speaker 1: It's just becoming a lot more prevalent with access to
tools like chat ebt and things like this. But AI,
there's always been an element of AI, not always literally,
but for a very long time in everything we do.
I mean, look, even twenty years ago, you could go online,
for example, and you could interact with chatbots. Maybe there's
a particular service that you are having a problem with.
Maybe you made a purchase through a website, for example,
and your item never arrived. There's something wrong with it.
So you go to the website and you try to
contact someone to get some help with your purchase, and
you end up talking to someone through a chat box. Right,
You're talking to someone, but the person you're talking to
doesn't seem to be able to help you very much,
or they seem to be really easily confused by what
you're trying to communicate to them. Why, Because it's not
an actual person. It's a chatbot, it's a bot. It's
AI that's been with us for a very long so
it's not new. It's much more prevalent, especially over the
last couple of years. It's much more prevalent than it
was and will continue to be. It seems to be
accelerating and unavoidable, but it's not perfect, and it makes mistakes.
It's almost makes it kind of human in that sense.
Right now, as it becomes more sophisticated, I presume it
will make fewer and fewer mistakes, but it still makes mistakes.
So in other words, again, I say all that to say,
people are going to get caught up in this net.
When I see these platforms saying well, we're going to
ban any use of AI in anything that is uploaded
to our platform, It's like, but how are you going
to accurately detect it? And I know some will say, no,
there's nothing to worry about here. You'd be surprised. I've
had people tell me that, Matt, you'd be very surprised
at how accurate AI can detect when there's AI being used.
I'm a little bit skeptical because again I'm someone who
has seen what happens when AI tells me, for example,
that I've done something wrong on YouTube, when I didn't
even do the thing that I'm being accused of by
this bot, and good luck trying to talk to a
real person, you know.
Speaker 2: Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1: There's been a couple of instances where I've appealed strikes
on my channel and one. But I've also lost some
too that I shouldn't have lost. But again, it's it
is AI. It's not a human being I'm talking to.
So so that's my concern about this.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, they can do whatever they want, it's their platform,
but I worry about people getting caught up in the
net who shouldn't be. It also says here again continuing
with this article, This is from Music Businessworldwide dot com.
It says band Camp said the new policy was driven
by quote the sheer quantity of human creativity and passion
that artists express on band Camp every single day. Users
will be able to report suspected AI generated content through
band Camp's reporting tools. The company says it reserves the
right to remove music based on suspicion of AI generation.
The company said it will update the policy as AI
technology continues to develop. The announcement comes over four months
since band camp launched a new thirteen dollars a month
subscription service that is human curated. The service gives users
access to monthly recorded selections, listening parties, recommendations, and exclusive
artists content. Band Camp general manager Dan Melnick at the
time said, quote, instead of algorithms, fans get human curated
picks from some of the best DJs and journalists in
their respective areas, exclusive interviews with artists, and community listening parties.
Vibrant music scenes are made up of dja's journalists, fans,
and artists, and band camp clubs reflect that as always,
artists are paid fairly and at the heart of the experience.
Speaker 2: Unquote all right, well, I like that. I like that.
Speaker 1: Founded in two thousand and eight, band camp launched as
a direct to consumer alternative to record labels for artists.
It has since expanded its services to include features such
as ticket live streaming, and vinyl pressing. Artists like Peter
Gabriel and b York have placed their catalogs on the platform.
All Right, I don't want to get into the whole
history of band camp, but uh okay, and then it
gets into some more details about band Camp. Oh, I'm
skipping down though, because Spotify is mentioned here and I
remember we talked about this on the show too, and
I expressed the same concern when talking about Spotify removing
AI generated music. Some artists are going to get caught
in the net, it says here. Spotify in September said
it removed more than seventy five million spammy tracks from
its platform over the past year. Amid the explosion of
generative AI tools, the streaming giant rolled out new policies
for managing AIG generated content on its service to address that.
In November, French streaming platform Deezer said it receives over
fifty thousand fully AI generated tracks daily, or thirty four
percent of all tracks uploaded to its platform each day.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, that's nuts. That is wild. Now. So
that's band Camp's position. Now someone has.
Speaker 1: Offered a I don't know if rebuke is quite the
right word, but there's an artist because you would think
you would think recording artists would be in favor of
what band camp is doing, and probably most are. But
Holly Herndon says band Camp's AI ban is misguided. This
comes from stereogum dot com. This went up just yesterday.
Earlier this week, band Camp issued a blanket ban on
generative AI and deep fake impersonations. The new measure makes
band Camp an exception on the streaming landscape where AI
music is becoming more and more inescapable. Most of the
reactions to this bandcam announcement were positive, but one artist
who's not applauding it is Holly Herndon, an experimental artist
who has long messed around with what she sees as
the artistic possibilities of AI technology. Holly Herndon has a
PhD from Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics,
and she has made her most recent album, twenty nineteen's
Proto with Spawn and AI Baby, curated by Herndon and
her partner Matt Dryhurst. A few years ago, Herndon and
Dryhurst launched Spawning, a tool that allows artists to choose
whether or not their work will be used to train AI,
and that work earned them Austria's first Digital Human Rights Award. Interesting,
I didn't know that was the thing. On Wednesday, in
response to Bandcamp's new policy, Herndon tweeted this, putting the
ban in band Camp. It is a wicked problem, so
I understand what they are trying to do. I'm sure
the human moderators won't be banning artists exploring AI. Rather,
I hope, will just be looking to filter out sound spam.
The gray area will only get larger m HM. After
a negative response to that tweet, Herndon elaborated with a thread.
She said this, I understand why band camp is taking
this measure, but it's a tourniquet. The human AI binary
is not going to hold and will become a matter
of superficial optics. I already have more authorship in my
models than most pop stars do in their songs. People
will already be using models to generate songs they then
put a human filter on. Artists will integrate generated passages
into they orchestrate, and will soon train their own models.
Another protection might be to flag accounts it posts on
an inhuman amount of content, but that too may seem retrograde.
We live with infinite media now. I encourage platforms to
be more curated, but enforcing a hard human AI binary
is not the right way to address this long term.
If an expert uses AI to help them write an article,
they otherwise would not have the time to complete it
will not be of less substance than a non expert
with time on their hands writing something by hand. A
practice or reputation of thought and work developed over time
is the best filter. The contemporary demand for twenty four
to seven content from people is the problem. So that's
that's basically her argument. So she's concerned. She has some
of the same concerns you, I mean from a little
bit of a you know, from a different perspective.
Speaker 2: But but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I think the tooth based is probably
pretty far out of the tube at this point. As
I like to say, Now, there's another element to this though,
and this is this is the part that people don't
talk about very much. But this came up on the
show not long ago. These streaming platforms because of the
rise of AI generated music and and how easy it
is to make it, and and it is a form
of spam. I think Holly Herndon referred to it as
sound spam when you just if you just make a
whole bunch of AI tracks and just upload them all
at once to Spotify and bandcamp, YouTube and wherever else,
it does cause a problem. Uh, in terms of storage
because you know, we like to think of you know,
it's just data. It's not it's not something, uh you
know that you can touch or feel or it's or
hold it. It's data is Therefore, there's just a It
doesn't take up any actual room anywhere. You just have
this infinite amount of storage space to put data. But
that's not true.
Speaker 2: You have to.
Speaker 1: You do have to create the physical mechanisms with which
to store that data, and you do have to make
more of those if you more and more data you
have to store. So if you think about this, I
don't know the numbers offhand how many different song files
are on band Camp and Spotify, and obviously it's in
the millions, perhaps in the billions, I don't know. But
if if that's all been ratcheted up exponentially because of
the rise and the ease with which you can create
AI generated music, then that's a problem. So of course
they have to find ways to filter this stuff out.
And then I found this. This is on Music Businessworldwide
dot com And this just went up a couple of
days ago.
Speaker 2: Music streaming.
Speaker 1: Music streaming platform now host a quarter of a billion tracks.
Speaker 2: Where does it end?
Speaker 1: And uh, this is Uh, this is short, but it
just kind of gives us an idea of the scope
of the concern here, So it says here there were
two hundred and fifty three million music tracks sitting on
audio streaming services at the close of twenty twenty five
yep over a quarter of a million. According to new
data from Lumini's new annual report, that was that was
up only thirty seven point nine million tracks, an average
of one hundred and six thousand uploads per day. Most
of this music was far from popular. Almost half of
the two hundred and fifty three million files hosted by
audio platforms received fewer than ten streams last year, Almost
three quarters of it received fewer than one hundred annual streams,
and nearly nine tenths of it received fewer than one
thousand annual streams. We're obviously a long long way from
Apple's promise to deliver one thousand songs.
Speaker 2: In your pocket with the iPod.
Speaker 1: Yes, as AI generated music proliferates, are we now just
a few short years from the likes of Spotify hosting
quote one billion songs in your pocket. And wouldn't such
a tidal wave of content inevitably swamp digital services while
hurting artists, songwriters and the perceived value of music amongst consumers.
Speaker 2: This is all.
Speaker 1: These are all legitimate concerns. In my opinion, I don't
know what the answer is. By the way, off, I'm
not here to offer solutions because I have no idea
what the answer is to this. But these are legitimate concerns.
Universal Music Group CEO and chairman Sir Lucian Grange certainly
thinks so, and he's keen to stop it from happening.
Last week, Grange delivered a stark warning about AI generated
content overwhelming streaming platforms. In his twenty twenty six New
Year's Address. He wrote, quote, validating business models that failed
to respect artists' work and creativity and promote the exponential
growth of AI slop on streaming platforms is a grave
disservice to artists', songwriters and all of us who work
in music unquote, this warning was not theoretical. Last year
Spotify removed think think about these numbers. Last year, Spotify
removed over seventy five million spammy tracks from its platform,
while rival Deezer reported receiving fifty thousand fully AI generated
tracks per day, accounting for thirty four percent.
Speaker 2: Of all daily uploads.
Speaker 1: So think about that. So on any given day, deezer,
what's being uploaded? A third of it a third is
AI generated tracks. Yet despite this aggressive purging of content,
the total amount of music and the global audio streaming
ecosystem continued to soar. In twenty twenty five. Discussion around
tracks that attract fewer than one thousand streams per year is,
of course particularly relevant. Here illuminates new numbers help illustrate why,
with UMG's encouragement, audio streaming services moved toward artist centric
style payment models a couple of years ago, and why
these models are now increasingly being stress tested by AI.
Speaker 2: In early twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Four, Spotify introduced a threshold requiring tracks to attract at
least one thousand plays in a twelve month period to
qualify for royalty payouts, which a lot of people were
mad about.
Speaker 2: They were critical of I get it though at.
Speaker 1: The time Spotify said ninety nine point five percent of
streams on its platform went to tracks exceeding the one
thousand annual streams threshold.
Speaker 2: Under its new.
Speaker 1: Policy, it's said each of those tracks would earn more
with payouts previously going to sub one thousand stream tracks
redirected back into the royalty pool. Deezer's artist centric model,
launched in partnership with you Universal and Warner, achieved a
similar aim, providing a double boost in royalties to artists
with a minimum of one thousand streams per month and
five hundred unique listeners.
Speaker 2: This goes on.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of numbers here, and we don't have
time to get into all of it, but the article
isn't that long, so if you want to check it out,
Music Businessworldwide dot com, which is a great website for
music news if you're interested in the industry and so forth.
But we are rapidly running out of time, so I
think we will close with that