General Intelligence

Is Spotify’s Newly Patented A.I. Plagiarism Detector a Data Collection Scheme?

‘Spotify wants machine-made music the same way Uber wants self-driving cars’

Dave Gershgorn
OneZero
Published in
4 min readDec 7, 2020

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Photo illustration source: sgcdesignco/Unsplash

OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.

Spotify, the music streaming giant with a reputation for underpaying artists, has staked its claim to a technology that it says could protect musicians from plagiarism allegations, according to a patent recently granted by the European Union.

According to the patent application filed in 2019, before publishing a song, or even when writing it, an artist would share a “lead sheet” with Spotify, a document that outlines a song’s melody, chords, and sometimes lyrics. The A.I. algorithm would translate the sheet music into a more machine-friendly format, and then compare it to music already in Spotify’s database. Spotify told OneZero that not every one of its patents becomes a part of its product, and wouldn’t say whether the system had been implemented or not.

Plagiarism is a critical issue in the music industry. Think back to the “Blurred Lines” legal battle, in which Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were made to pay more…

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Dave Gershgorn
OneZero

Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.