Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:59:37 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier, Mitch Glazier
[00:59:37] S3: Well, I think the policy problem of of supply is it will affect the business somehow. We should talk about Spotify for a minute. It's amazing that we haven't spent more time talking [00:59:45] S4: about Spotify. [00:59:46] S3: I'm I think the model companies are just not going to listen, right? Like you can see what they are doing. They are gluttonous for data and they think that they can outrace the consequences. We'll see what happens there. Spotify is not training a model. Spotify is just distributing music. That's the thing that they're doing. They're a pure play business in that way and they have a lot of incentives for AI music to replace the music they have to otherwise pay for on that platform. They have a lot of incentives for white noise and fake streams in in history in to to do these things and they've gotten in trouble for some of that. Right? Like this is a real thing that happens on this platform. Are they going to participate in a labeling scheme when say this is AI music? [01:00:27] S4: I think so and not because as much as they have an economic incentive to lower their costs, their biggest economic incentive is to keep fans paying $9.99, $129,915.99 a month. And so if fans feel duped, is [01:00:45] S3: that proven out in the market? I'm actually very curious about this. [01:00:48] S6: Yes.
01:00:48 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
[01:00:48] S6: Yes. [01:00:48] S3: Right, you're saying you're gonna know there's AI slop on Spotify now or when you search for Taylor Swift, you get a bunch of weird Taylor Swift sound alikes which is an experience everyone has on Spotify. It hasn't churned those fans yet. There's not some exodus to title or Apple Music. Spotify is still dominant in its way.
01:01:04 · Mitch Glazier
[01:01:04] S4: Right. I think they're walking down the road slowly, probably a little too slowly. I'm trying to see if they can do like just enough to keep those two things in balance. Like right now, for example, Spotify is saying, well, we'll only we will only disclose or label a recording as AI in the credits. How many people look at the credits? Yeah. I wish more people looked at the credits. They discover producers and songwriters and other awesome folks who have contributed to the recording, but they don't. They need to do it at the track level. They're not there yet, but they are disclosing AI personas that are made because that's sort of like the highest on the dupe on on the dupe scale. Right? And then on under that, they're looking at the fact that already 90% of the recordings available on Spotify get like 10% of the revenue and 10% of the content gets 90% of the revenue because most of what's on there gets less than 10 listens or less than a 100 listens because all of this slop is just going on. Which means storage costs and all sorts of other things that they have to think about. So I think that they will go as far down the road as fans will demand, as their users will demand. And I think when we get to a point if people get recommendations in their algorithm, Like, if you like this song, you'll also like this one. And when you listen to it, it turns out it was AI and you didn't know it was AI and you feel deceived, that's when they've got a giant problem. Because they're responsible for that recommendation. They're the one that fed that to you. And so we do have lots of consumer research out there that shows that subscribers just like all consumers wanna feel like nobody's pulling the wool over
01:02:49 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier
[01:02:49] S3: their mouth. But is there an actual market pressure? I can think of all kinds of times fans have revolted against Spotify, right? Like I love the band Stars and every now and again they'll tweet like we didn't make any money on this song on Spotify and everyone tweets at Spotify and they're mad. Spotify is not paying artists any more money. Right? Like is there an actual market pressure that will make this labeling happen or is it or is it policy pressure? [01:03:12] S4: It's both, it's combination, but because there are already laws in other countries that are mandating labels and once a market like The EU or The US that's such a big market or The UK or China, Once they demand labeling on a global system, it's actually cheaper to do it all around the world than it is to try to just sort of geo block it. [01:03:33] S3: This is the California car emissions model of regulation. Right?
01:03:33 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier, S10
[01:03:33] S3: This is the California car emissions model of regulation. Right? [01:03:36] S4: The... So the cal... It's amazing what what California can do because these companies are headquartered there. Yeah. I mean, not Spotify, but Apple and Google and others. And so like the transparency law in California is the reason why Suno has to now as of August put a watermark in there, you know, saying this is AI generated that's machine readable. One state but they're doing it all over the world. Right? Because that's where that grows. So it's a combination of policy which obviously we are very directly engaged in and competition. I predict that what Apple decides to do that is more fan friendly will drive Spotify and vice versa. There's not that much churn between them, but if there's some sort of perception that you're being more subscriber friendly than somebody else, that tends to drive results. Just like it does on the privacy issue for example. Yeah. You know, where there's no law on it, but now companies are competing to say, we're the private browser. Apple, we protect your privacy. One [01:04:43] S3: one company says that. Let me ask [01:04:44] S10: you this.
01:04:44 · S10, Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier
[01:04:44] S10: you this. [01:04:45] S3: I I only got a few minutes left and I I wanna stick one turn at the end to talk about how you measure for platinum certification because that's also up in the air. Sure. But let me just ask you one more question here on labeling. We spent a lot of time at The Verge covering labels for images and media, right? There's all these standards that exist. I have one poor reporter, her name is Jess Weatherbed and she just, she has been forced to learn everything about the C2PA standard and content, synth ID It's and [01:05:13] S4: all these important though. [01:05:15] S3: They're very important and we spend a lot of time covering them because they have to work and they have to work on a number of different places in the chain, right? They got to work in the camera, they got to work in Photoshop and then they got to work on Twitter and everyone has to agree. And if Elon Musk does not want SynthID to show up on his platform, it doesn't matter if it worked in the camera. This is a big chain. It seems harder in music, like much harder because I don't know a bunch of bedroom DJs are probably not going to participate in your technical scheme for labeling when they upload to DistroKid. An artist getting a beat from a producer over iMessage, who knows if that metadata will survive. You might have to watermark the sound files themselves in some deep intrinsic way and that can get you into all kinds of trouble because now you're screwing with the audio files at the software level and artists don't like that. How do you make labeling work at all?