“Functional” music — whale song, white noise, anything designed to play in the background — garners 10 billion streams per month, says Oleg Stavitsky, co-founder of Berlin-based audio-technology company Endel. In fact streaming of functional music doubled last yeare, contributing between 7% to 10% of the entire streaming market.
After sleepwalking into the last big disruption of MP3 file-sharing two decades ago, labels are responding with sound and fury to what would ordinarily be dismissed as muzak. Universal Music Group NV, after recently blasting “lower-quality functional content,” has reportedly asked that streaming platforms crack down on AI services scraping artists’ back catalogs to train their machines.
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Music’s disruptive future therefore risks looking a lot like its past: noisy and unequal. Record labels aren’t entirely wrong in asking streaming platforms to clean house in favor of more “human” music. But this is also a good moment to think up fairer ways to distribute the streaming spoils and keep new human artists emerging. If whales are about to become a musically endangered species, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Lionel Laurent, ChatGPT Is Knock Knock Knockin’ on Spotify’s Door
Bloomberg.com
J.S.Epperson 
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