Spotify’s Next Big Move: AI, Owning Fandom & Ending Spam With Sam Duboff | Billboard on the Record

Is Spotify becoming more than just a place to stream songs? This week, Spotify’s global head of marketing and policy, music business, Sam Duboff, joins host Kristin Robinson to talk about how the platform is evolving to serve both artists and fans in new ways. From developing AI tools with the music industry’s consent to removing spam from the platform, Duboff shares how Spotify is working to deepen listener connections and turn viral hits into lasting fandom. He dives into Spotify’s shift from a streaming service to the home of an entire music ecosystem, plus, what new features are coming next to help artists grow, connect and get paid.

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Kristin Robinson: There’s been a lot going on at Spotify in the last few months. You might’ve heard that Daniel Ek, the company’s founder and CEO, has stepped down from his post, triggering a shakeup in the company’s top brass. And you might’ve also heard that Spotify updated its policies on AI. This was very eagerly awaited by the music business given the company has come under fire for not having any AI specific policies in place yet to date, and to be more specific, Spotify strengthened its rules of spam on the platform, impersonation of artists and created a system for self disclosure of AI use.

And while some were very grateful for this, others felt that the strengthened policies did not actually go far enough. To be fair, it’s hard to know the right way to treat AI music on streaming services. It’s something that all of them are grappling with. If you demonetize AI music, for example, are you creating an incentive for a streaming service like Spotify to plug AI songs in their playlist recomendations, given they’re all now free? Or do you ban them from the platform? But what if AI songs become part of popular music culture?

And also there are significant dangers of doing nothing about it, too. Like, what if someone uses AI to copy you voice into a song, and tags it into a page using all of your fans? To top it off, Spotify is rolling out a series of new features, as well.

Keep watching for more!