Spotify cracks down on bot listeners tuning into bot-created tunes

Kaan Pinar -

Imagine you're an aspiring DJ, and your rival on the turntables is a robot. That's the reality in the music world today, with AI music startup Boomy making waves, and not all in a good way. The company, which spawns tracks from user inputs, has been called out for supposedly juicing its stream counts with bots. The result? Spotify's hit the eject button on a good 7% of their songs.

  • The numbers are staggering, with Boomy claiming to have generated a whopping 14.5 million songs – that's 14% of the world's recorded music!

Zoom In: The fracas kicked off when Universal Music Group (UMG) smelled something fishy about Boomy's streaming figures and flagged it to Spotify.

  • This isn't UMG's first time in the AI-music ring. They made headlines last month by kicking up a storm over a viral track that used a cloned version of Drake's voice. Not cool, UMG said, likening it to "fraud."