Coda Music Rolls Out AI Detection Tools for Artists and Listeners
The streaming music landscape appears to be quite stable at this stage. While several players, including Qobuz, Tidal, and Deezer, strive to break out from the pack, giants like Spotify, Amazon, Apple, and YouTube compete for the top spot. However, a new player appeared in September, which was quite unexpected. In an attempt to set itself apart from the top streamer, Coda Music took advantage of the recent controversy surrounding Daniel Ek, a co-founder of Spotify, by criticizing Ek’s controversial funding of the defense technology company Helsing earlier in the year. (The platform hasn’t benefited from Spotify’s continued running of ICE recruitment commercials, either.)
A new tool that seems to be intended to address another of the recent Spotify controversies—AI slop music flooding the platform—is being announced today by the fledgling service. In response, Coda Music is introducing artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to identify and label music that weren’t written by real people.
Coda’s strategy has several aspects. To begin with, every artist added to Coda will have their AI roots examined, and their profile will be marked “AI Artist” so that listeners are aware of what they’re getting into. Additionally, Coda allows consumers to flag artist profiles if they think the music is artificial intelligence (AI) created. The firm will then examine the profiles and classify them if needed.
Lastly, you can completely disable AI artists with a toggle in the options. They can certainly understand the appeal of simply changing that to “off” and avoiding as much slop as possible, but how beneficial this setting is will obviously depend on how well Coda labels AI-created music as such.
There are a few other things that set Coda Music apart, aside from its position on AI and its guarantee that it does not “invest in war.” While acknowledging that no one is paying artists enough, the company claims to be paying the “highest per-stream rate” in the industry. The company’s website states, “The real problem isn’t how much is paid per stream, it’s that streaming alone doesn’t pay enough.” “And minor improvements to a fundamentally flawed per stream model will not help.”
In order to achieve this, the business also allows customers to designate a “independent or qualifying artist” to receive $1 of their monthly subscription price. Even though it’s just a $1, it’s the kind of thing that helps musicians at least somewhat.
Additionally, Coda has excellent motivation to desire to be seen by both artists and users. The company’s goals to transform its app into a social music-sharing feed where you receive recommendations from people rather than algorithms are the final significant differentiation for Coda. In order to achieve this, users can publish anything from the app in their feed. You can even share external links and images, so feel free to share those blurry photos from that NIN concert.
In addition to the standard recommendations based on what you’re presently listening to, the app’s main page prominently displays fan-made playlists and suggested people to follow. Additionally, you can share songs, artists, or albums, view posts from artists you follow, and read postings from people you follow on the social tab. The last part is crucial since Coda wants artists to engage and share in addition to end consumers.
It reminds me a little bit of the Fan Groups feature that Amazon Music recently unveiled. Like that feature, Coda’s challenge is encouraging users to start contributing to a new network instead of just publishing content on the app they already use. Fortunately, music enthusiasts enjoy a sense of community, so it will be interesting to see if this succeeds at all.
Coda says that its iOS and Android apps currently offer the additional options for reporting and removing AI music. The business claims that a web interface will be available shortly, but it does not yet have one. Coda presently costs $11 per month, or $17 per month for a family package with up to four listeners, if you’re interested in avoiding AI-generated music.
