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?”
Cackles maniacally in Plex lifetime pass and self hosting
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.
/me waiting for the additional charge on top of that they’ll offer in exchange to flick a “no AI” switch.
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.
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?!
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.
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. That’s roughly 25 million subscribers that would be predicted to sign up for AI slop at 5 bucks a month. Combine that with what I’m sure would be looking to pay the artists a lot less and only having to pay for computing resources instead of people, that’s still a fuck ton of money for them.
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.
“Ai efficiencies will be passed on to the customer!”
Remember this next time billionaires say they’ll happily pay onto UBI or whatever.
Because a lot of people don’t care or even like this stuff.
So they will pay more for it, right? Right?
There’s people willing to pay an extra to listen a butchered automatic cover of a song where Spotify probably doesn’t even pay royalties on that?
I thought the market would prefer the opposite: pay extra for a noslop guarantee, with a full monthlysubscription refund if a slop is accidentally inserted in a playlist
Exactly, I would have thought you might have some AI only free/cheaper tier. At least that kinda makes sense as a use case, not that I could see myself ever paying for it
Well, gotta make all the AI cost back somehow. Most people are too comfortable to actually change anything, so they’ll just pay more
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.
Boycott them already. Stop paying them anything.
After the Helsing controversy I dropped them. I miss being able to play local files and better Japanese music coverage but I’m glad my streams are supporting the artists a little more.
This would get me onto Qobuz at least.
Welcome to the club, there are dozens of us in here already! The water is warm and the sausages are mostly coocked through
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 🏴☠️
I don’t get it. I downloaded music on napster, then added kazaa files, then limewire files, then megavideo stuff along with youtube rips, and now i just download a song when I like it. Why did everyone else get these subscriptions? Dont you need internet to hear music? You dont own any of it…
because for some time spotify was cheap, easy and useful so people were happy to pay
it’s fast become less of each of these and relies more on playlist lockin
“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”
When they first came onto the scene, streaming services offered a fairly cheap and convenient way for people to listen to whatever music they want whenever they want. Prior to this music piracy was widespread because the alternative was paying $10 at tower records for each album or, a little later, $1 per song on iTunes. People didn’t pirate music because they cared about owning a copy for themselves, they just didn’t want to deal with the expensive and inconvenient alternatives.
Rising subscription costs, increased AI slop, etc may usher in a new Renaissance of music piracy similar to what we’re seeing with TV/Movies.
And also, it takes ages to skip between songs, because I have to wait for the stream to load. On my local music player, I can flick between them almost instantly until I hear one I like. And shuffle doesn’t repeat the same 20 songs, apparently YouTube Music and Spotify cannot implement proper shuffle, it’s too intense of an engineering task.
Because too many people don’t respect their own time and corporations used this + ZIRP to turn the internet into a ad hellscape of conveniences.
We don’t have good options for local music discoverability, and the major labels don’t have any incentive to even sell music to individuals in the first place anymore. I unfortunately pay for music streaming just because I don’t like listening to the same songs over and over. So to me the variety of new songs you can get from the algorithms on streaming services is worth paying for to me. Luckily, I don’t need to use Spotify, and just because they’re choosing to bundle an AI subscription in to their plans doesn’t mean all their competitors will too.
Too much work and waste of storage space.
Looks like I’ll have to not use Spotify even harder
