“In the future you’ll go to Spotify, you’ll see The Beatles, and The Beatles AI”: Rick Beato shares his worries about AI
The YouTuber spoke in front of a Senate committee about AI in music last year.
Credit: Daniel Knighton/Getty Images
If there’s someone who knows his stuff, it’s Rick Beato. The YouTuber often has interesting things to say, and this time he’s talking about AI.
In November 2023, Beato testified at a Senate hearing about the technology, and almost four months later is speaking on it again, this time in an interview with News 8 WROC – and he’s got mixed views on the matter. He says, “There will be things that people like, that are created by AI, and there will be people 20 years from now, [saying], ‘Oh, I much prefer AI Rolling Stones than [the original] Rolling Stones. That’s just gonna be a thing.”
He continues, “People, companies – whether it’s Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, Warner Music, UMG, Sony – are gonna have all their own AI-generated music. Those are the downsides. Who’s gonna hold the copyright on it? What are the songs that the models are gonna be trained on? I believe, in the future, you’ll go to Apple Music or Spotify, you’ll see The Beatles, and The Beatles AI; Led Zeppelin, and Led Zeppelin AI.”
That said, he does have some good things to say about AI. “One of [the benefits] is on the display in the new Beatles song they did [Now and Then], where you can use AI to separate things like [the track where] John Lennon sang and played the piano,” he says. “You can separate the voice from the piano without any artefacts, which you could never do before. You can’t hear any of the piano in his voice, and you can’t hear any of his voice in the piano. That’s a really great thing.”
In the interview, Beato also looks at the current trends in music that he’s noticed. “Country and rock have taken a turn up, and hip-hop has gone down in popularity over the last four years or so, which I thought was interesting,” he says.
”I noticed on some of the Spotify countdowns that I do, that there’s a lot more country songs [among the top 10], more rock songs, more songs with organic instruments like guitar, less autotune, less programmed beats. There’s definitely a change happening in popular music, and I don’t know if it’s a trend; we’ll see what happens. Usually, it takes a couple of years to see things through. But there are some trends that are happening, [and] that I think are really positive.”
You can watch the entire interview here:
To hear more from Rick Beato, head to his official YouTube channel.
