Artificial intelligence will encourage more people to create music in the future and is not a threat to the industry, the founder and CEO of streaming giant Spotify has said.

Artists using machine-learning tools to create music have raised concerns about whether music created by AI - even entirely fake artists - could one day replace humans.

"I'm optimistic and very excited because we're only now starting to understand the future of creativity that we're getting into," Daniel Ek told reporters at an open day at the company's headquarters in Stockholm this week.

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and the recently released book "Mood Machine" accuse Spotify of hiring several producers to create thousands of songs under fake AI profiles that the company incorporated into playlists, saving Spotify money by displacing real artists and their higher royalties. Spotify has denied the allegations.

"We want real people to realise themselves as artists and creators, but what will creativity be like in the future with AI? I don't know. What is music?" said Ek.

He recalled that electronic dance music and DJ culture, and before that hip-hop where people used music samples, were not originally considered "real music." Noting that Mozart had to compose entire symphonies in his head, Eck said that "now any of us can create a beat in five or ten minutes."

"The instruments we have now are just stunning. Sure, there are a lot of scary potential applications of AI, but what's more interesting to me is that the amount of creativity that creative people will have at their fingertips will be incredible," he said. The barriers to creativity are getting lower. More and more people will create," he continued.

He said the development of AI in the music industry "is more of an evolution than a revolution".

Spotify has 678 million active users as of the end of March, including 268 million paid subscribers.

The EC noted that the company, which reported its first annual profit in 2024, already has 100 million paid subscribers in Europe alone and hopes to one day reach one billion paid users worldwide.

"I have no doubt that Spotify's potential at some point is to reach over a billion paid subscribers," he pointed out. | BGNES, AFP