IT News on November 1st: According to the Financial Times, Spotify is actively advancing copyright licensing negotiations and is making efforts to persuade musicians to embrace new technologies. Spotify plans to launch a new service driven by artificial intelligence in early 2027, which will allow users to create their own remixes and cover versions of songs.
Insiders revealed that Spotify plans to launch the product in the first quarter of next year and may make its debut around the Grammy Awards in February (Grammy Awards). One of the insiders stated that Spotify is considering charging subscribers an additional $4 to $5 per month for value-added service fees (IT Note: The current exchange rate is approximately 26.7 to 33.3 yuan).
With this feature, paid subscribers can use artificial intelligence to rearrange popular songs; for example, they can adapt a folk song into a dance tune or create a new version of a certain singer's cover of another artist's song. People familiar with the matter remind that the specific timing and pricing have not yet been finalized and may still change.
After that media reported on its artificial intelligence mixing plan, the stock price of Spotify rose by nearly 6% on Friday. The company refused to comment.
Spotify is in negotiations with Sony Music and Warner Music regarding the licensing agreement to enable this feature. It is reported that the company has already reached agreements with Universal Music Group, the independent label licensing agency Merlin, and the French music company Believe.
Despite some artists resisting this technology, the launch of this product will become a crucial test for the music industry to see if it can transform generative AI into a new source of profit growth.
Relevant insiders revealed that Spotify has teamed up with Universal Music, the world's largest record label giant, to begin one-on-one communications with several well-known musicians, in an attempt to persuade them to grant music copyright to this service.
However, sources admitted that compared to persuading some well-known veteran musicians, gaining the cooperation of popular superstar artists is significantly more challenging. According to the plan, even if their record companies have signed licensing agreements with Spotify, the musicians themselves still have the right to decide whether to participate or not.
Spotify Announced this feature as early as May of this year, but no further details have been revealed since then. In August of this year, the company's co-CEO, Gustav Söderström (Gustav S ö derstr öm), stated to investors that the service would be officially launched once all preparations were complete.
It is worth noting that this service is distinctly different from AI music generators, such as Suno, which generate entirely new audio from scratch based on text prompts. The mode of Spotify allows music fans to create derivative works based on the works of musicians who have granted authorization and consent to participate.
According to the current plan, the copyright royalties generated from fans' creation of remix versions will be fully returned to the original musicians. Sources also revealed that Spotify is developing a supporting system to allow these remix works to be included in various playlists, and their play counts will also be directly counted towards the official chart rankings of the original songs on Spotify.
At the investor conference held in September this year, Soderström publicly called on established artists to actively embrace this AI value-added feature in order to broaden their monetization channels:
"If you were a singer active in the 1980s or 1990s, the only way to increase your income was to rely on other professional singers to cover or remix your old songs. But now, you can completely rely on your fans around the world to create, remix, and cover your classic works themselves."
He further added, "As long as one fan creates a remix of your song, your share of royalties from the overall streaming media copyright pool will increase accordingly."
