Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
Understanding Why Spotify Is Moving Towards AI-Generated Music: The RIAA Equalisation Hypothesis
By A. Carter-Wilson
When an algorithm decides what millions of listeners hear, the underlying philosophy might surprise you — particularly if one looks at how 45 years of analog audio engineering shaped our relationship with noise itself. But before getting to Spotify’s strategy, it helps to understand something that almost nobody in the streaming industry discusses: that vinyl—the medium that defined an era—was never about music. It was about managing a compromise between physical grooves and human ears designed by people who understood entropy before anyone had a name for behavioral economics.
The RIAA equalisation curve, introduced on January 17th 1956 as the industry standard for record playback, was designed not primarily with sound quality in mind but with physical manufacturing constraints: reducing low-frequency amplitude below a specified threshold prevented grooves from becoming too narrow to cut on audio lathes, while simultaneously compensating for high-frequency losses that would have rendered discs inaudible after only a handful of plays. What this produced — the warmth every vinyl-enthusiast swears by — was an inherently asymmetrical relationship with noise where equalisation both created and partially corrected the vulnerability.
And here is what most commentary on AI music for Spotify utterly fails to grasp: the dynamic established by RIAA curves — that every compression standard generates its own signature of silence, but only in reverse playback does a listener become genuinely aware of that space — translates directly into why synthetic content represents something entirely different from what critics claim.
The crucial observation is this: Spotify primarily sells not music at all, but the silence between tracks. This insight — that each platform’s true marketable unit was never the audio itself but rather the spaces where nothing played — has been obvious to anyone who actually studies how listeners use headphones with active noise-cancellation. When someone puts on Sony WH-1000XM5s or Apple AirPods Pro, they are actively applying a further algorithmic layer of suppression over top of what has already been compressed into silence by streaming platforms and equalisation curves going back five decades. What the listener pays for is not merely songs — it is an infrastructure designed to make both background audio and foreground commercial content equally suppressible through personal device calibration.
And this produces something remarkably lucrative. The value proposition of Spotify’s business model becomes clearer when we consider that listeners wearing ANC headphones are actively cancelling not just ambient noise but potentially the very tracks themselves. In such a listening environment, where individuals tune out both environmental sound and streaming audio simultaneously, what remains valuable is precisely the silence between songs — an empty space in which to insert ads, podcasts, or algorithmically generated filler content that occupies the gap when actual music becomes background itself.
The implication for Spotify’s strategy is both strategic and structural: if the platform sells primarily on the premise of curated silence rather than curation of content, then AI-generated material represents not innovation but an optimisation — a method to fill those gaps without consuming catalog budgets or licensing restrictions that human-produced tracks still carry.
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 precisely for showing that humans process sound as noise and silence simultaneously — distinguishing what they attend from what they filter out is not a conscious decision but an automatic economic behaviour. What Spotify does at scale with streaming platforms mirrors this: it presents listeners thousands of tracks while selling the empty moments between them as advertising real estate, content space, or synthetic material generated without licensing overhead.
The result will not be that Spotify’s musicians are replaced en masse tomorrow. But the structural pressure towards synthetic audio follows inescapably from a logic established more than fifty-five years ago: namely, that every compression standard generates hiss unless you remove the medium producing it — and once you do so (as digital streaming platforms have done), your default must inevitably drift toward machine-generated content precisely because music produced by humans will always carry an acoustic signature no amount of RIAA equalisation can fully erase.
In other words, understand why listening through noise-cancelling headphones changed the equation entirely before discussing why Spotify is pivoting toward algorithmic music: the act of personal suppression — cancelling ambient sound to produce a deeper silence than any platform could engineer alone — creates an environment where synthetic content occupies space humans actively avoid by design.
In closing: when commentators ask whether artificial intelligence will “ruin” the music industry, they are entirely missing the point. Because the real question is not about replacing musicians but recognizing that every major compression standard from 1956 onward has been moving toward this end — eliminating hiss (RIAA → Dolby A/B/C → MPEG compression → lossless streaming) while listeners with noise-cancelling headphones actively cancel more music than they ever intend to hear. The vinyl groove was never the point: elimination of silence’s acoustic signature always was. Spotify just happens to reach that result earlier, through algorithmic means rather than audio engineering alone — and precisely because a platform selling primarily on curated quiet finds AI-generated content both cheaper and perfectly suited for the empty spaces listeners themselves create by pressing pause with their own ears instead of a thumb.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.