*How many* AI-generated songs are uploaded to streaming each week? Why are Radiohead's fans angry about tickets? Why has Spotify given users lossless music for free? And much more...

0:09Hello and welcome to the Price of Music brought to you by Music Ally, the show that's fascinated by all the fun and games and finances of the music world as explained each week by me, Steve Lemack and him, Stuart Dredge, if you want an easy guide to what's going on in the music business and how it all works. With one or two revealing stats along the way, then here we are. In fact, we'll start, as always, with an interesting big number, which this week is, Stuart, what have you got? It's 30 ,000.

0:39Stu:30 ,000 what? It's not how much I'm spending on my son starting university this week, although not far off. 30 ,000 is how many fully AI-generated tracks are being uploaded to streaming service Deezer every single day. Every day? Every day. 30 000 ai tracks just ai tracks every every day what's that what's that in percentage terms do we do we know yeah so deezer has been talking about this stat quite regularly so in january it said that 10 of all its uploads were ai generated tracks in april i went up to 18 and now it's 28 so not far off a third of all the new tracks and the thing here is that by implication if it's happening on diesel it's probably the same for its bigger rivals yeah so you know 28 of all the new music is fully and i i did some maths that's 210 000 tracks every week that's nearly 11 million a year like 11 million ai slop tracks um yeah i mean i was doing some maths as well because if if roughly doing the maths then if if diesel is putting up if it's putting up i don't know how many how many tracks a day 100 if if you do the math 30 000 that's roughly a third so d's is putting up a hundred thousand tracks a day i mean i mean that's yeah it's you know that that is more math that's 70 songs a minute i mean in the time that it takes us to finish this podcast more than 2 000 tracks will have been added of which now we learn of which a third of those are quite possibly AI generated.

2:25Stu:I mean, how are we supposed to make sense of this? It's actually come down a bit. It used to be 120 ,000 a day, but it's come down. But yeah, so the one thing is that a lot of the coverage of this stat, because it sounds frightening, doesn't it? It sounds kind of worrying. A lot of the coverage has been like the sky's falling in, human musicians are in trouble, these services are being overrun by AI music. But there's some other numbers that these have released that kind of may make you feel a bit happier about it or a bit more comfortable. So these tracks, it's very careful wording, fully AI generated tracks.

2:55Stu:So it doesn't include like if a musician's used AI in some way to make their song. Yeah. Stuff has been created only. They account for 28 % of uploads, but only 0.5 % of total streams on Deezer. So less half a percent. And it also says that 70 % of those streams are fraudulent, which basically means someone has stuck an AI track up and is using bots to try and earn royalties. from it so if you do the maths on that so 30 so um uh 28 of uploads ai generated um 30 of their streams are real humans only yeah and 0.5 percent of total streams ai that means that only 0.15 percent of all streams on deezer are ai generated music by actual humans wanting to listen to it so it kind of tells you that well it's partly because deezer isn't recommending that music it's got a policy it won't put it in its playlist and it won't recommend it in its algorithm so it's kind of squashing the promotion of it but i think it also tells you that people don't want to listen to this stuff at the moment people want to listen to people so if you're a human band going oh my god the sky's falling in actually humans don't want to listen to a at the moment and it could change there could be some amazing bangers releasing that will change things but i mean it's not it's not quite as sky falling in as it maybe seems at the first Yeah, that's true.

4:15Can I just mention two points, though? That's the storage for this, though. If we are creating these or somebody is creating these 30 ,000 tracks a day, it just adds to, I mean, Spotify already have massive warehouses, don't they, to house all this music. surely then you know this is only going to increase the pressure as more and more tracks go on every day some of which we really don't possibly need as you say if people aren't listening to them we don't need these tracks but it's going to cost us in the end because it all adds to spotify's running costs the fact that they've got to house all this music and the climate i mean there's a

4:53Stu:there's a well in fact it's a wider issue about ai technology and what's the impact on the climate of all the servers needed um i know people who don't like to use track gbt because they're worried about the climate impact of it all. And there's an argument that here, yeah, the more music there is on service and no one's listened to, there still is a cost and there still is heating and water. So, yeah, it's worrying from that point of view. Yeah, but the second point is, obviously somebody's making this music, no one's really listening to it. It's taking up all this. The only winners from this are the startup companies which are offering the AI software.

5:29I mean, are they the ones doing the victory lap around the office? Because the rate of growth of AI tracks seems to be gaining pace.

5:41Stu:Well, yeah, although it could be a double-edged sword there, because I think what Deezer is saying is most of this stuff is being put up with fraud in mind. Right. And so if you're those services, you don't want to get sued for copyright infringement, which some of them are, and you also don't want to be associated with fraud. You don't want people kind of saying, right, you're being used by criminals to try and make money. So in a way, I don't know if they'll be doing a lap of honor. It does show the growth of it in one sense. But I mean, the other thing I saw in the list of this week, do you remember we talked a lot about the Velvet Sundown a couple of months ago?

6:17Yeah.

6:17Stu:So they were the AI band creating. And they had like 1.5 million listeners on Spotify. I think people are still quoting that stat and saying, oh, did you hear an AI band had a million and a half listeners? they've only got 320 000 now and that is a mark again of that was one of the better examples the more the better examples of ai music put out and the audience the fifth because people were curious but didn't want to come back to it and i think a lot of the people that that 300 000 people have seen the band pop up again in there when there are playlists and gone i wonder what they're doing now what's the latest stuff sound like still curious so i think that's the message here is that Yeah, there's so much stuff being uploaded, but humans still, by and large, want human music.

6:59Stu:And don't be too existentially kind of fearful. News stories this week. Once again, we've picked three, which we think you'll be interested in. We'll start with this one, which we touched on last week. But it's the Radiohead gigs or, well, more pointedly, Radiohead's ticketing for the new tour, which was I mean entirely designed to try and shut out the touts but more than a thousand tickets for the Radiohead dates were on ViaGoGo and similar sites before I think they even went properly on sale I mean I think I know the answer to why or how this may have happened but as someone who applied for tickets and didn't get one what's your take Stuart?

7:46Stu:it yeah it's interesting i'm still i'm containing my disappointment um but yeah i mean obviously that for anyone who hasn't been involved in that you know radiohead got fans to pre-registered in there and you had to register details you then got on an unlock code which got you into the sale and transfer tickets or you didn't you got an email saying sorry you haven't got one and the whole point is we're shutting out touts and bots only fans will get into the sale to buy tickets so yeah so this follow-on is that people have been listing them and and so what we don't know is if you're listing tickets before they went on sale you didn't have those tickets but that's the that's the nub of it isn't it if someone listed those tickets on thursday the day before in sale they didn't have a ticket to sell and that's why people across the band's management was quoted as saying this is this is bad we're encouraging fans to stay away from these tickets and we're going to working to shut down unauthorized sales so if you're already a fan going on but i mean like i mean i get the temptation if you missed out on tickets if you didn't get a code or you didn't get tickets, you might want to go somewhere and say, I'll pay 500 quid to go and see these gigs.

8:48Stu:They're going to be amazing. I understand that. But you could then get to the gig and be turned away because your ticket was sold illegally. I'll tell you one thing I did enjoy about the Guardian report on this was they included a quote from Reg Walker. And if you ever see Reg quoted anywhere in any story about secondary ticket sites or anything to do with live music can ticket touts listen to what he's saying because he's legendary in live music i mean actually i mean said that i only heard about i heard of him last uh year we were a few of us were in a pub after a meeting i'd been at um in my capacity as chair of live and the stories people were telling about the lengths he's gone to to alert promoters about the workings of the touting world absolutely breath just the amount of intel that he apparently has on the shady world of boss attacks and you know the tactics that touts are using take your breath away but anyway in in that story reg actually said these tickets don't do not exist so it's a clear breach of the consumer rights act which is designed to protect consumers from fraud what what are the actual companies saying though I know they always say we are but the conduit for people to sell their tickets.

10:08But surely there is some implication here that aren't you allowing people to sell tickets that they don't have?

10:15Stu:This is the issue, I think, because a lot of the statements are people have the right to resell the tickets. They're promoting that. You go on to Villegogo, there's Radiohead, a button on the front page to go and find tickets there. And they seem geared up for a fight. They're like, people have the right to resell tickets on our thing if they want. But like I say, I had some stats. So you know Feet, so FEAT, who they campaign against dodgy resale practices. And they did a lot of this research, I think that was partly behind the Guardian article. I think they found, I think it was 1 ,751 listings, like many of which more than the 1 ,500 euros and some of nearly 4 ,000 euros before the on sale happened.

10:52Stu:And that kind of, it's very hard to argue that those aren't speculative listings where the people were selling don't have tickets yet i believe there was some claim that they might have got tickets to hospitality i mean and that might be true of some concerts but yeah it feels like everything radio have done has been to avoid this happening but yeah so i mean the thing the thing i was writing for musical i was trying to put this quite carefully because there's so many ways you could defend people it is it is kind of a challenge or it's going to be have to be quite sensitively handled by radiohead and by their partners because i think a lot of fans are thinking oh i didn't get a code.

11:26Stu:Like I didn't even get a chance to open 17 browser windows and try and get tickets for these concerts. I'm really excited about. So people are disappointed at that. But if you're saying, well, the reason we did it this way was because to make sure the touts couldn't get tickets, you might go, okay, I get it. I was unlucky this time. Fair enough. But I understand the rationale. But then when lots of people are selling tickets on Viagogo, you're going to get cross i think and you're going to feel like well i didn't get a chance to get tickets and yet what they said they were going to prevent is happening anyway so i think that's why it's quite important for the band to see the quotes in the band's manager they're on this they're going to be cracking down and i think that is quite important um it's a weird thing because i always think it's because i i am a veteran of 17 browser window ready minute before a sale like it's just become what you do isn't it and you feel like that's you're getting a fair chance of tickets if you do that but a lot of the reason that people are trying things like road ahead are because that's not really fair because there might be thousands of bots ahead of you in the queue and so that's the thing here is that i think they were they were trying something to shut those people out and that's a good thing but a lot i think keeping the fans on side will depend now on on successfully cracking down on anyone who has.

12:43It's interesting, we've mentioned this on a few occasions recently, that the government is currently working on a report on secondary ticketing, which we were sort of expecting to arrive around now, but still hasn't emerged. And we don't know the exact date when it will be published. But I imagine some of this, I wonder if they'll have to hold up the report again to add in the implications of this particular incident. Well, we shall see. Story two this week, Spotify has finally added higher quality, lossless music nearly five years after they first promised it. Unexpectedly though, we won't have to pay more for it.

13:29Can you tell us what lossless is? Because lossless sounds like the title of a My Bloody Valentine album that never was. What is lossless? and why aren't they charging? What's changed?

13:41Stu:That is it. It's a lost My Little Valentine album they've added. It's very anticipated. Now, I mean, do you know what? I actually spent 10 minutes trying to think how I'd explain lost music. It's basically higher audio quality. Right. So technically, you're listening to this song without some of the audio data being discarded during the process of compressing it. So when it's being compressed to make it kind of easier to download or stream, you lose some of the stuff, you lose some of the audio. And lossless is, claims to be what it seems. And then you can get into, if you go on certain internet forums, you can get into big debates about what is true lossless and is it what it says it is and so on.

14:19Stu:But basically it's much higher audio quality. Caveat, depends what you're listening on. If you're listening on a shit pair of headphones, it won't sound great. You know, if you're listening on a great... Noted. But you must have good pairs of headphones, surely. i mean it's a reasonable pair i won't lie um but yeah so like you said nearly five years ago spotify said it was going to launch this new thing called spotify hi-fi which would be higher quality audio and you would pay more for it so it'd be more expensive than the spotify subscription to get better audio quality and a big announcement and then um it never came it never happened and the main reason for that was that year apple music said we're adding lots of music to apple music and it won't cost anything more and then amazon did the same and suddenly you became very hard to charge more for better audio because it was being okay yeah so it's so essentially what's happened is spotify went back to the drawing board um it's it's said all the way along we're still working on we want to offer better audio quality and earlier this year and we talked about this i think didn't we there were these rumors of a new super fan tier on spotify and the three key things you get will be a like early access to ticket pre-sales higher audio quality and some kind of dj style mixing feature and so what's happened now is they launched this dj style mixing feature a few weeks ago for premium users and now lossless music but it's part of a premium so if you have a spotify you will now be able to get lossless music and you won't have to pay more so it kind of begs the question what is going to be in this room and superfan tier if it's not these two things yeah yeah um which i guess the answer is either different stuff like there are no rumors yet about what different stuff but different stuff or maybe they're doing this you could conceivably think well they'll launch this give everyone a taste of it and then say right but now you have to pay for the more expensive superfan to if you want to carry on having it that's possible it would be quite a you know it might be quite a kind of bad pr thing for them to do people cross um but yeah so it's sorry Stuart I just love that I love the way you the way you pronounce the word cross it's just because you're when you say cross I mean it actually indicates a whole lot of emotions mostly um which are well you could use a much stronger word for rather than cross.

16:39Absolutely. When you say cross, you're politely saying very peeved off.

16:46Stu:Very, very jolly peeved off is my prediction. But the gist here is like, this has been a long awaited feature. People are quite excited about it. But it's kind of interesting. The music industry used to hope that you'd be able to charge more for lossless music, high quality music. And now it seems maybe you can't, but maybe you can charge more for other things. Story three, America may be the world's biggest music market, but I don't know if anyone saw this. The new figures which came out the other day are claiming that the American music market, only it grew by just 0.9 % in the first half of the year.

17:26Has something gone wrong or has the market simply reached something of a plateau?

17:33Stu:that's what people are asking really uh unclear i mean it's like it's a new record it's like 5.59 billion dollars which is a new record so that's good but it's very soon i was looking at the past years so the past they release this mid-year report every year saying what's happened in the first half of the year uh in 2021 it was up 27 percent 2022 up 9.1 percent 2023 up 9.3 percent kind of the same and last year 3.9 percent and now 0.9 percent so this is quite a rapid slowdown in terms of the growth. So digging into it, music subscriptions doing quite well. I mean, like the money made from music subscriptions was up 6.3 % in the US last year.

18:12Stu:And that's more than the previous year, higher rate of growth. But free streaming was down. Other kinds of streaming were down. Like they have this thing called personal radio, which is when you kind of, you can't just choose any track. You sort of pick a station and it plays music. Those things are down. So other kinds of streaming beyond subscriptions are struggling a bit but even physical sales fell and even vinyl sales fell they were down one percent and that's been the big story like vinyl has been growing and growing and growing year after year and those sales were down so it's like a mixture of things happening it's physical sales having a wobble free streaming which i think music industry has been complaining about quite a lot recently yeah free stream isn't doing well enough that's down um it's kind of interesting as well there's a bit of finger pointing starting to happened so spotify came out quite quickly and said we grew faster than the market in the us we paid out more which kind of was a way of saying look at our rivals they're the ones letting the team down right there's already a bit of finger pointing what's going on here who's to blame happening over there um and this is something i think we're going to see maybe more of this year just this idea of like streaming's growth was kind of quite exciting for a long time are we reaching that ceiling like you said are we reaching a ceiling of like well everyone who wants to pay is already paying yeah people do disagree with that they say there's still more growth to be had um but yeah and if so what does the industry do and what do the streaming services do to try and reignite that growth okay um any other business oh i know you wanted to mention because i don't know the answer to this but um king gizzard and the lizard wizard didn't didn't They were massive on Bandcamp, the digital albums chart last week, and I couldn't work out why.

19:59They had about every album in the top 20 or something. Top 30. Top 30, right. Okay, so why were King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard the entire top 30 of Bandcamp's digital album chart then? Explain to us.

20:15Stu:Yeah, it involves me saying King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard lots. Do you know if you're the same? I always say wizard lizard. That seems more natural to say. That would be much more helpful if they call themselves that. I constantly write. I wrote a story about that. I had to literally spend five minutes checking I got lizard and wizard in the right order. Or I hadn't called them king wizard and the gizzard lizard. Anyway, Australian rock band, lots of fans. This story begins in July, actually. They quit Spotify. And if you remember, they remember those stories about the Spotify CEO, Daniel Leck, had an investment in an arms company and is also there, the chairman of the board.

20:51Stu:And a few bands have quit Spotify and Priddle, like Deerhoof quit Spotify and then King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard quit. And they gave this quite entertaining quote. It was like, fuck Spotify. We just removed our music from the platform. Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better? So they came out very strongly against we're taking our music off Spotify because we don't agree with this. I would say they were cross. They were very cross. Very cross is a gradation of that. Yeah. And so, yeah, so they've been putting more focus on Bandcamp. And what they did last week, they had the entire top 30 albums.

21:22Stu:And what they've done is they made every single one of their albums pay what you like. And that included paying nothing. So you can go on Bandcamp to their store and you can get any of their albums for nothing, or you can choose what to pay for it, you know, a couple of dollars up to whatever. And so that's why they're the top 30. It was kind of to do with this pricing strategy of like anyone could do that. And from their point of view, what they're doing is they're reaching new fans who are giving them a try. But their existing fans, this is something we've looked into. Do you remember when Radiohead did in Rainbows and how to pay what you want thing?

21:56Stu:And I think there's a lot of evidence that actually the keener the fan, the more they'll pay, even if they could just put in zero. So what's happening here is there'll be fans of the band who are actually paying for the albums. So they're making money from sales, but they're also reaching anyone on Bandcamp who's curious at all about what they sound like. um so it's kind of yeah it's it's they're making this work for them um and it's difficult i don't know how many artists could do that like any artist could go to band cap and say right my entire catalog is essentially free how about it um it's quite a you'd have it's quite a bold strategy some people will be like i don't know if i want to do that what if it kind of lies to everything else yeah but it's working for them working for them um here's something we should mention because this this came up in the lock-in last week but has since been creating controversy in offices and homes across the uk do you file pj harvey under p or h some updates what about the music ally office we we did it and it just split like so last week we said it and we we basically disagreed didn't we politely yeah no they were set to get cross and so musical office split i said you know pj harvey pia someone went p obviously and someone else went h at the same time so yeah because i was a p i was a p man that sounds wrong i was i i thought p but you thought h didn't you i still find under h yeah pj harvey under i mean i'm not saying i'm right uh and we didn't get around to john spencer blues explosion properly where do you put john spencer blues exposure um our producer was saying where'd you put van morrison but that's him that's obviously him isn't it van morrison oh look at your face no no you see i'm not disagreeing i'm saying it should be m but but in my head i'm like v was my first thing i could i need i need to bounce something on you actually because i was chatting to producer joe and we had an email from a listener actually yeah and we wanted to bounce it on you to see what you said without any preparation oh okay all right okay and this is from james the joiner who you remember our fan and absolutely our superfan james yeah he got into she said he was very very complimentary about our superfan lock-in as well but he was in waterloo records in austin looking for the debut album from the artist 86 tvs yeah so if you've been working there where would you have filed 86 tvs and the name is 86 yeah it's 86 yeah so it's yeah it's numbers so you see in my record shop if i had a record shop because this all started dear listeners after i once offered my services to work behind the counter at the marvelous resident records the shop in bryson um and uh yes i've worked i've worked behind the counter uh obviously lock-in listeners know all about this this is the sort of anecdotal goals you can expect in the lock-in anyway you start the day by putting out new records in the racks that's where this conversation began in my record shop i would have something which was numerals so i think i put them all there although having said that one there was a band called a thousand one thousand violins i think that was one thousand was that one thousand the numerals or was that were they a thousand violins i don't know but i would because actually i put thousand violins that's different isn't it difficult okay right it one uh it would go in the numeral section if not it would go under e okay so james said it was filed under e for 80 yeah um but then joe and i were talking we would think where does the numerical section go does that go before a or after z oh it comes at the end every everything comes at the end you know weird compilations different genres um yeah chick chick chick you can have your own thing And it's right at the very end.

25:50Punctuation section after or before numerical section. It's a minefield, isn't it? It is. It is. If you have any other filing dilemmas that you'd like to share with us or present for us to debate, then do get in touch. One last bit of any other business, I think. Actually, a couple of last ones, because I do want to mention. I know you wanted to mention this bad bunny story. But can we just add, and this is coming off the back of last week's show, Morrissey, we lightly ribbed Morrissey for putting his back catalogue, all his rights in the Smiths up for sale via a slightly anonymous email address.

26:33uh morrissey announced within i think hours of us uh going live last week that the email address was coming down because it had so many offers and he was now going to um well siphon off the best and worst i suppose uh but he was going to sift through sift through all the offers but the the email address no no longer exists i'm afraid everybody um right this is the last bit of any other business latin american star bad bunny this is um uh news from last week bad bunny is filling stadiums across the world but not in mainland u.s uh and why is this it's a little complicated and

27:12Stu:it's a bit political it is yes and mainland is quite important there because he has played a big run of gigs in puerto rico which is sort of part of the u.s but not mainland it's where he's from uh yeah he's on this huge stadium he's like the breakout one of the breakout latin american artist of recent years isn't he and he's playing stadiums he's playing stadiums in london in madrid paris sydney and he gave us interviews saying why he's not visiting the us on this tour and he said basically ice could be outside my content my concert uh not vanilla ice although that would be of course um ice being the us immigration and customs enforcement agency i can't remember i made a joke i can't really like how to joke about ice yeah um they've been running these raised into pain and deport suspected illegal immigrants very controversial entity lots of kind of um discussion and lots of kind of um anger about what they're doing yeah right so that's what is that why he's not yeah because essentially a bad bunny stadium gig would involve you know what 60 70 000 fans coming together a lot of whom might be of latino heritage yeah and he's worried that ice will be waiting outside at the end to cart off anyone they suspected of being so it's a really sobering moment he's basically i don't want to tour the us i don't want my fans to be targeted in these immigration raids um and to bring that back to business from politics like latin music is really growing for several years has been growing faster in the us than the overall market like the ria actually puts out latin music figures every year and they show it's it's growing it's a really powerful part of the industry there but now one of its biggest artists is saying, I don't want to tour that market.

28:50Stu:And the US is still, I think it's the biggest live music market in the world, isn't it? So the biggest Latin artist is not touring the biggest live market because of what's happening in politics and immigration policy. So it's a weird moment. All right. And finally, for this episode, Bjork's latest release costs how much? $44.99. that's dollars or pounds 44 90 44 99 what do you get for that well so this is a thing called volna cura vr remastered so you know bjork has always been into new technology she's always found ways of putting music out i remember she did an app back in the day that was brilliant one of the first music apps on ipads so she released a virtual reality version of her album volna cura in 2019 and now it's been remastered so like this is this is something to make you feel old like it's not just albums being remastered in the 70s it's it's virtual reality apps are getting remastered versions um and it's now out for apple's vision pro headset which is apple's kind of you know vr headset okay and so you put it on and you get these immersive visuals you get surround sound music i've seen demos and it looks wonderful so i'm you know not um but this is the price 45 quid which i was thinking that's a bit much but then i looked at what a vision pro headset costs and you have to pay three and a half thousand dollars for a vision pro headset in the first place so once you paid that 45 for a bjork album that's really interesting is maybe not such a big stretch perhaps and i suppose if we're comparing it to some the other price of a colored vinyl well double album on vinyl it's not actually that much more expensive um in a way for considering what you get it's just the it's just the outlay and outlay for the um for the hardware that's going to cost you that's it and i honestly i love bjork like i love the fact that she's been doing this she does this stuff with technology and it's never to make a quick buck in fact i think she often spends loads of money on it and doesn't necessarily make it back because it's part of her art so honestly if you have a vision pro and you have forward give it it looks wonderful but yeah I need to put it on my Christmas list and hope someone wins the lottery in my family if you've got enough money to have one yourself come sponsor this podcast that's it we're out of time for this week thank you very much for listening if you are enjoying what we're trying to do please do spread the word tell your friends or leave us a review online if you get a chance that really helps to put us in front of new audiences alternatively you can support us via Patreon In fact, if you sign up to be a super fan, as mentioned, you get an extra 15 minutes or so of me and him chatting about music and money in a fairly free form kind of way.

31:46This week, it will centre mostly around my ire regarding the Mercury Prize nominees. If you'd like to join us for that, become a super fan at patreon.com slash the price of music. alternatively if you'd just like to get in touch with us we'd love to hear from you uh you can use our socials or send us an email anything you don't understand about how the industry works that you think we might be able to make sense of for you or any guidance or advice from the professionals the price of music podcast at gmail.com that's the price of music podcast at gmail.com until next time take care of yourselves bye for now

32:40We'll be right back.