Photo Credit: SubmitHub
SubmitHub switches it up with a new AI policy that will keep AI music off the platform—even at the cost of up to 10% of its current revenue.
SubmitHub has announced a new AI policy that builds on Spotify’s move to keep AI music out of recommendations. With Spotify tightening the leash on what can earn royalties, SubmitHub says it won’t build a platform that promotes music that won’t get any plays on the major streamers.
It’s a notable change given that neither SubmitHub nor Spotify seemed to have much of a problem with AI-generated music in its infancy. But now things are changing.
“At the end of the day, we as a team have decided that we want to build a platform that actually helps people promote real music. And if the algorithm means AI creators can’t achieve that, we’re wrong to sell a service that claims to provide it,” said SubmitHub’s Jason Grishkoff.
Tracks determined to be at least 85% likely to contain AI-generated audio will no longer qualify for SubmitHub’s music-promotion services under the platform’s new AI policy. This restriction applies to both fully generated songs and “hybrid” tracks that have gone through some human processing or editing.
The policy will be enforced via SH Labs, SubmitHub’s detection system, which the company boasts achieved a 99.4% accuracy rating in third-party tests. Notably, there will be no appeals process, and writing a song’s lyrics or underlying composition will not mean a recording is exempt if the completed product crosses the detection threshold.
To that end, SubmitHub says around 11% of recently uploaded tracks scored above 85%. The company previously revealed that 23.2% of all submitted tracks were fully AI-generated.
“Creating music is art. Art requires years of practice, honing your craft, working with others, failing, and getting back up again,” Grishkoff continued. “By all means, use AI as an assistive tool. I use it for a lot of my coding. And I know many real musicians are using it for ideas, for stems, and for samples.”
“If creating AI music brings you joy, that’s great, and I’m happy for you. But there are hundreds of thousands of songs uploaded daily, and we don’t need more noise—certainly not when it’s simply created with the click of a button, derived from the works of hundreds of thousands of real artists it trained on/stole from.”
“Making real music isn’t easy, but that’s kind of the point. It shouldn’t be as simple as pasting your lyrics into a machine that spits out a song for you,” Grishkoff concluded. “A future where the music we listen to is generated by a machine is terrifying. And I don’t want SubmitHub to be part of that.”