At this point, the streaming music landscape feels pretty well settled. Giants like Spotify, Amazon, Apple and YouTube duke it out at the top, while plenty of other players like Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer try their best to stand out from the pack. Somewhat surprisingly, though, a new player emerged in September. Coda Music used the recent backlash around Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek as a way to differentiate itself from the number one streamer, calling out Ek’s controversial funding of defense technology firm Helsing earlier in the year. (Spotify’s refusal to stop airing ICE recruitment ads certainly hasn’t helped the platform, either.)
Today, the fledgling service is announcing a new feature that feels designed to answer another of the recent Spotify controversies: AI slop music flooding the platform. In response, Coda Music is launching AI identification tools with the purpose of finding and labeling songs that weren’t composed by actual humans.
There are a few prongs to Coda’s approach. For starters, any artist added to Coda will be reviewed for AI origins, and their profile will be labeled “AI Artist” so that listeners know what they’re getting into. Coda is also letting users flag profiles of artists if they suspect the music is AI-generated; the company will then review them and label them if necessary.
Finally, there’s a toggle in settings that just lets you turn off AI artists entirely. Obviously, how useful this setting is will depend on how good Coda gets at labeling AI-created music as such, but I can definitely see the appeal in just flipping that to “off” and avoiding as much slop as possible.
Besides its stance on AI and the assurance that the company does not “invest in war,” there are a few other differentiators about Coda Music. The company says that it currently paying the “highest per-stream rate” in the industry — while at the same time, it acknowledges that no one is paying enough to artists. “The real problem isn’t how much is paid per stream, it’s that streaming alone doesn’t pay enough,” the company’s website says. “And minor improvements to a fundamentally flawed per stream model will not help.”
To that end, the company also lets users pick an “independent or qualifying artist” who gets $1 of their monthly subscription fee. Sure, it’s only a dollar, but it’s the kind of thing that sweetens the pot at least a little bit for musicians.
And Coda has good reason to want to make itself visible to users and artists alike. The last major differentiator for Coda is the company’s ambitions to turn its app into a social, music-sharing feed where you get recommendations from humans rather than algorithms. To that end, users can share anything from the app in their feed, and it also allows you to share external links and photos as well (go ahead and post your blurry images from that NIN concert!).
The app’s home page prominently features fan-made playlists and recommended users to follow in addition to the usual suggestions based on what you’re listening to already. And there’s a social tab where you can see posts from people you follow; share songs, artists or albums; and see posts from artists you follow. That last part is key, as Coda wants artists interacting and sharing as well as just end users.
It reminds me a little bit of the Fan Groups feature that Amazon Music just announced — and as with that feature, the problem facing Coda is getting people to start contributing to a new network rather than just posting things on whatever app they’re already using. Fortunately, music nerds love a community, so it’ll be interesting to see if this takes off at all.
As for the new features for reporting and filtering out AI music, Coda says they’re available as of today in its iOS and Android apps. The company doesn’t have a web interface yet, but says it is coming soon. If ducking AI-generated tunes is something that catches your attention, Coda currently costs $11 a month, or $17 per month for a family plan with up to four listeners.
