Curated RSS Brief
Why would you disrespect your favorite artist with an AI remix?
AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Entertainment Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Report Why would you disrespect your favorite artist with an AI remix? Spotify says its AI music tool is for superfans, but I’m not convinced. by Terrence O'Brien Close Terrence O'Brien Weekend Editor Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Terrence O'Brien May 22, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC Link Share Gift Prompt something better than Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul,” I dare you. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Entertainment Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Report Why would you disrespect your favorite artist with an AI remix? Spotify says its AI music tool is for superfans, but I’m not convinced. by Terrence O'Brien Close Terrence O'Brien Weekend Editor Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Terrence O'Brien May 22, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC Link Share Gift Part Of All the latest in AI ‘music’ see all updates Terrence O'Brien Close Terrence O'Brien Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Terrence O'Brien is the Verge’s weekend editor. He has over 18 years of experience, including 10 years as managing editor at Engadget. AI covers and remixes of songs are already a blight on the internet. Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are awash in flat reggae versions of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” dinky country renditions of The Weeknd, and monotonous Motown reimaginings of AC/DC. Now, a new tool from Spotify will make them even easier to generate and share. Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) signed a licensing deal that will allow users to generate remixes and covers from UMG’s catalog. How exactly it will work, beyond being “powered by generative AI technology,” or how much it will cost, is unclear. They’re positioning this as a premium subscription add-on service for superfans. According to UMG’s CEO Sir Lucian Grainge, it’s supposed to “deepen fan relationships.” There’s no denying that learning to play your favorite song on guitar or dissecting a track to create your own remix can teach you a lot about songcraft and help you appreciate your favorite artist more. But those benefits don’t exist when you just prompt AI for a bluegrass version of Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul.” Frankly, the whole thing feels disrespectful to the concept of human creativity and to the artist serving as the source material. There’s also a tinge of narcissism at play here. Learning to play or sing a song creates a connection to a work and helps you develop a skill. An AI cover is just about shouting, “Look at what I made.” Or, more accurately, “Look what I asked a machine to make for me.” You can see this at play in the Suno subreddit, where people frequently say they only listen to their own music . People there proudly proclaim that they don’t listen to artists on Spotify or other streaming services anymore, they only listen to what they generate using Suno. Those are the people who will pay for Spotify’s remixing tool. Not Swifties looking to build a deeper connection with Taylor. It will be people who think that, somehow, whatever they generate will be better than what a skilled remixer can create. They will convince themselves that they can somehow improve on the work of an army of the most talented songwriters in the industry, with some clever prompting. But, they’re not actually engaging with the art in any meaningful way, and they’re certainly not creating art themselves. Frankly, the whole thing feels disrespectful to the concept of human creativity and to the artist serving as the source material. And what superfan wants to disrespect their favorite artist? At best, people prompting AI covers are simply having a laugh and churning out genre mashups. Which you could argue is a harmless use of AI, but it’s also not a particularly valuable one. Related Suno is a music copyright nightmare Musicians are getting really tired of this AI clone ‘bullshit’ Obviously, I can’t speak to the quality of Spotify’s specific generative AI output, as the tool hasn’t been released yet. But I’ve spent enough time with Suno and other generative AI music tools to
- AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
- Follow Follow See All AI Entertainment Close Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
- Follow Follow See All Entertainment Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
- Follow Follow See All Report Why would you disrespect your favorite artist with an AI remix?
If you want the exact wording, examples, or full context from the publisher, open the original source article.
Open Original Article
Comments
Post a Comment