Endel is Berlin-based audio technology company. It trains its sound engine on thousands of in-house stems (stem-tracks) to create customised ‘soundscapes’ for the listeners by adjusting to external environment, say rain or sunshine, or the cardiac pace of the listeners or the temperature at the time of listening. It is called ‘functional music’. It plays in the background and collects billions of streams per month. In fact, here human beings listen to the machines.

Endel has released an AI lullaby with Canadian artists Grimes and has tied up with Amazon for playlist partnership.

So far, so good. However, in future an AI-generator chatbot could produce music like Reshamiya or Vishal-Shekhar from scratch. AI has already created snippets in various genres, and imitated the style of lyricists, and adopted vocal chords and timbres of various singers.

Music companies have taken steps to prevent the streaming platforms to scrape the back catalogues of artists to train their machines. In the past music was disrupted by MP3 file sharing some twenty years back. Now this new disruption has come from AI.

Top artists who are stars account for 90 per cent of streams. They are future-proofed. An artist-centric payment model could be developed to favour the music people listen to in the foreground. The real issue is for those who are the runners up.

Music companies should also distribute the proceeds of the streaming music in a fair manner so as to encourage new talents.