What was announced on the earnings call
On its second-quarter earnings call Spotify said that Merlin, the licensing partner representing independent labels and distributors, has joined Universal Music Group behind its forthcoming AI music feature. Merlin represents more than 30,000 independent labels and distributors, which widens the pool of artists the feature can draw on. The tool lets listeners generate AI covers and remixes from participating artists' tracks. In Spotify's account the artist has to opt in, the original artist is credited, the artist is paid, and the feature is sold as a paid add-on. The company said it will first open a research preview to a limited subset of users and does not need a complete catalogue to begin; no date was given.[1]
The missing parts of the consent
The way to assess a consent framework is to ask who gives it, for what, for how long and whether it can be withdrawn. The account in the report answers none of these. Whether consent operates per track or per catalogue is unclear; whether it can be revoked is unstated; there is no formula for how payment is calculated. Because the parties Merlin represents are labels and distributors, in many cases the consenting party may be the company holding the rights rather than the performer. Spotify's statement does not draw that distinction.[1]
The most reasonable conclusion from that gap is that the framework is currently an invitation to take part rather than the outcome of a negotiation: the parties have agreed in principle, and the detail gets written when the product is ready. A weaker explanation also holds: the terms may already be defined in the licensing agreement between the two sides, and an earnings call is not where they get read out. The only thing that separates the two is a published document, and no such text exists yet.[1]
Where the licence and the detector part ways
This morning in this column I looked at a music app whose own detector flagged two songs as AI-generated, and the conclusion there was that a similarity score cannot say where a track came from. Spotify's framework sits somewhere different on exactly that point: if consent is taken at the moment of generation, which work a track derives from stops being something to estimate afterwards and becomes data the system already holds. Credit and payment are the readable output of that data. But the advantage can only be confirmed once the text defining the scope and duration of consent is published; without it we are left with a statement made on an earnings call.[1], [2]