That said, there are a lot of people who simply enjoy having something playing in the background, it doesn't matter what, and if you're into country music it's great to have 10,000+ hours of country music to play.
If Tidal provides a checkbox so you can choose whether to exclude AI content, I think that would work for both audiences.
This would then become something similar to how legal tech where a license is required to practice law relies on a few lawyers sitting as a gate after the AI
Here we are. music is great, people do not suspect it's ai, artist behind AI is making money. Real work, real people are happy. It's just the voice and instruments are not real. How is it different from club music made in fruity loops? This music is just more complicated, hence no fruity loop. With AI you don't need to assemble the entire band do to funk music. Isn't that democratize access to music production?
I would not call someone typing words into a prompt an "artist" doing "real work", and they definitely should not be monetizing it.
I know professional musicians that will use AI models like Suno as an aid to their tracks - mostly where they'd previously use samples or program things themselves. In these cases, where the track may be x% AI and (1-x)% Human performance, where x is very small, I think monetization or even copyright shouldn't be too difficult.
But I also know people that use tools like Suno for everything, where every single aspect of the song: Lyrics, music, production is all done by AI tools. They basically just prompt some style and vibe they want, and will upload the result. In these cases, I don't think monetization or copyright should be possible.
Then again, it is difficult to know how much AI someone used to generate their tracks, so I'm not sure how this could be enforced. I also know people that are earning very good money off their (entirely) Suno-generated tracks.
I'd love some Internet Pirate Radio. If someone wants to sort through the best all-AI tracks and run those, that'd be cool. I don't want an AI to pick the best AI tracks.
It’s pretty cool technology. You just ask for a certain feeling to be evoked and you can have it done. Magical.
> AI music generation tools are changing how music is created and distributed. As this technology evolves, Tidal is introducing platform standards to protect artists, their craft, and inform listeners.
> Here are the highlights of our new AI Policy:
> - Tidal will identify and tag AI-generated music in our app. Listeners will see an "AI" badge next to music we detect as wholly AI-generated.
> - Tidal will not tolerate AI-generated music that impersonates an artist or group, or that facilitates fraudulent activity. We're implementing automatic tools to remove these releases immediately and on an ongoing basis.
> - Tidal will not allow music that is 100% AI-generated to be monetized. No royalties will go to such releases, nor will AI-generated uploads be eligible for direct-to-fan sales.
> - We will expand these policies to music that is substantially AI-generated when AI detection technology is sufficiently reliable to do so.
> You'll start seeing these changes from July 15.
> Check out the full policy here. To learn more, please visit our FAQ.
> For the music,
> The Tidal Team
All in all seems reasonable. There's definitely been a wave of cheap slop flooding Tidal's library lately and removing the incentives for it seems like the exact correct approach to stemming that tide.
The only thing worrying to me is the use of “AI detection technology”; that stuff is notorious for both false positives and false negatives, and it seems to only be getting worse as AI is getting better at hiding its “tells”. As long as there's an appeals process with a human in the loop it should work out fine.
I'm also curious about how they'll define “substantially AI-generated”, i.e. where they'll draw that line. Human vocals over an AI backing track? AI vocals over a human backing track? All human performers, but using instruments with AI-generated sounds?
Take away the attraction to the grifters and you reduce the issue.
Of course this does not eliminate the problem of the streaming platforms tolertating AI generated work so that they do not need to pay as much out for your subscription fee.
Personally, if there were a decent Spotify alternative that had a zero tolerance to gen AI policy, I'd switch without a second thought.
That has some different second order consequences that I don't think you're seeing. It's not that they will be free to you as a user, it's more that they will be free from the platform perspective to do whatever they want with the revenue they get from it.
Say for example you have a platform with Spotify monetization scheme for instance, which is already very unfair to small artists. But now imagine you have to compete to be included on auto play or playlists against something that's basically free for Spotify, what's your chance of getting any money out of it? Say Spotify changes their algorithm and starts pushing 20% of all auto play playlists to consist of AI songs, that's basically a 20% bump on their profit basis.