- Apple Music’s Oliver Schusser says a third of downloads are driven by AI
- Despite this, only 0.5% of all users interact with this content.
- Apple Music plans to fight the AI epidemic even further
Apple Music has become the latest music streaming service to be hit by the influx of AI-generated content, says its vice president Oliver Schusser – but it only reaches a very small percentage of all users.
Speaking to Billboard ($/£), Schusser shed some light on the state of AI music in Apple Music’s library, sharing that “over a third of what (Apple Music) gets today is actually what we would say is 100% AI.”
This shows that it’s increasingly easier for labels and distributors to submit music made entirely using AI, and Apple Music isn’t the only service facing this epidemic. Last week, Deezer said that nearly half of new music submitted to the platform was AI-generated, leading the company to stop offering high-resolution versions of those songs.
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So how does Apple plan to put out the AI fire? Well, Schusser went into more detail in his interview. “We never talked about it, but we developed technology internally that would allow us to see exactly what music people are offering us, what AI (model) it is and all that,” he reveals, likely referring to the transparency labels.
Last March, Apple sent a letter to industry partners revealing plans to roll out “transparency tags,” a new metadata system to help flag AI-generated and AI-assisted music. This means that labels and distributors can disclose whether AI was used in the production of a song when submitting it to Apple Music. Although it’s optional, Schusser made it clear that he “really needs content providers and labels to take responsibility.”
There’s no denying that fully AI-generated music is showing up in top music streaming services, but Schusser revealed an interesting statistic that may come as a surprise: Despite this increase, it’s not having a huge impact on users’ listening and engagement habits. “The reality is that AI music usage on Apple Music is really minimal. I’m rounding, but it’s less than 0.5% of usage. We’re just at the beginning here,” he told Billboard – but fraud is still rife.
It’s another issue that Apple Music is tackling, but it’s been since the good old days of iTunes: “It’s been a 20-year journey because there was already fraud, obviously, in iTunes,” Schusser said, leading to the introduction of Apple’s fraud penalty. The company also doubled this penalty starting this year.
But the battle is not over, as Schusser says: “We are investing way more than anyone else in reducing and eliminating fraud. We implemented a fraud penalty four years ago, where if we catch someone, we take the money and put it back in the pool. We need to watch the AI music because there is a correlation between AI and fraud.” He also shared that Apple saw a “60% reduction” in fraudulent downloads after implementing the penalty.
As it stands, I’ve been one of the lucky ones not to have encountered AI-generated music flooding my recommendations in Apple Music as well as Spotify, although the latter has come under scrutiny when it comes to hosting AI. Like other platforms, Spotify is also working to protect users by removing 25 million AI tracks in the last 12 months and developing a strong anti-AI strategy for the future.
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