This week, Spotify issued its one-year report card on its promise to keep AI-generated slop off the platform. The company says it has excluded more than 50 million slop and spam tracks from recommendations this year, on top of 75 million phony tracks removed outright.
One man in particular worked the system and recently earned an 18-month prison sentence. Smith created hundreds of thousands of AI songs and deployed bots to play them billions of times, racking up more than USD 8 million in royalties over the course of the scam. Among Smith’s fictional musicians: Calm Knuckles, Calorie Screams, Calypso Xored and Calliope Erratum. An impressive festival lineup, even if nobody actually shows up.
Another “band” to raise eyebrows was Velvet Sundown, whose gauzy Spotify biography alarmingly describes the music as: “Shimmering tremolos, warm tape reverbs, and the gentle swirl of organs give everything a sense of history without it ever feeling forced”—a dead AI giveaway, given most humans would probably feel something if their organs were gently swirled.
Eventually, the project acknowledged its AI origins and YouTube commenters had a lovely time. “Loved this song since I was 8 bit [sic] old, now at 64GB this brings back a lot of memories,” said one. Another shared, “My fridge begins to vibrate and spits out ice cubes when I play this.”
AI gets a better rap in the music scene when it’s playing with people. In the 1980s, trombonist and composer George Lewis created Voyager, a groundbreaking computer-driven improvising orchestra capable of responding to musicians and going off on its own musical tangents. While the project is rich in technical and cultural significance, it also gives us some delightfully bonkers performances.
Naturally, the possibilities of sliding into unhinged territory are boundless, so meet Dadabots: two music hackers who trained a neural network on extreme metal and gave it a gig with no scheduled ending. “Relentless Doppelganger” has been generating a 24/7 livestream of technical death metal since 2019.
The engineering behind this racket is actually quite something. Dadabots adapted SampleRNN, a recurrent neural network originally designed for speech synthesis, to generate music one tiny slice of audio at a time.
Then came the problem: finding the good bits. Their solution was D.O.M.E.—the Disproportionately-Oversized Music Explorer—which uses machine learning to cluster and visualize the results. Thus was born a machine designed to … listen to death metal?
If all this leaves you craving a little more flesh and bones to your music, let’s swing the pendulum to Forgotify, a charming website developed to unearth Spotify tracks that, for the most part, nobody had ever played. A random sampling of around 25 tracks revealed an unexpectedly vigorous diet of obscure metal, vintage jazz and blues and things with “drone” in the title or band name.
Among our discoveries was Shorty Rogers’ genuinely terrific “Cool Sunshine,” from the 1955 album East Coast-West Coast Scene. If you’re feeling more in the metal vibe, try Sirens’ “Drone,” which, ironically, turns out to be about digital revolution, circuits, programming and technological alienation. “Line by line, code by code,” they sing. At last, a soundtrack for failed IT transformation.
And finally, the mysterious “Very Distant City Traffic Drone with Sparse Metal Movement,” though it turns out it was just a sound effect. Disappointing. Still, after the Velvet Sundown, a recording that turns out to be exactly what it claims to be has its charms.
—Elly Trickett has a degree in Music Composition from Dartington College of Arts
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