Is Spotify hitting the right note on AI streaming?

Hello, and thanks for tuning in to the Marketplace Morning Report, live from the BBC World

Service on the Annaburn, a very good morning to you.

Spotify has become a global leader in audio streaming with over 500 million monthly active

users and revenue last year over 11 billion dollars.

The Swedish company has been criticized for paying artists very little per stream, allowing

hate speech on its platform.

Now questions are being raised over its willingness to stream content created by artificial intelligence.

Its founder and CEO, Daniel Ack, has given it an exclusive interview to the BBC, which

he says there are valid uses of the tech in making music, but AI should not be used to impersonate

human artists without their consent.

You have so-called deepfake AI's where someone's impersonating some famous artist,

and our view is obviously that is not positive, and we believe that, say, something in the

Drake Weekend case that Drake and Weekend should be able to decide what kind of content

they want to put out in the world, what they stand for.

So, would they ban AI content?

We have no immediate plans, and in fact, it wouldn't even surprise me that if we look

at the top chart of Spotify today, that there's legitimate use of AI done by artists, and

we would allow for them.

And then there's the one where it's clearly someone trying to steal someone's name or

likeness or even infringement of someone's IP, at which point we would say that it's not

OK, that is not what we stand for, and we would take that down.

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