Spotify says it has pulled more than 50 million apparently AI-made tracks from its curated recommendations this year, part of an effort to keep synthetic music from crowding out human artists, according to NBC News.
Spotify said it has removed more than 50 million tracks that appear to have been made with artificial intelligence from its curated music recommendations this year, NBC News reported. The company framed the move as a way to stop AI-generated music from pushing out human artists.
In a statement Tuesday, Spotify said that “AI-generated slop and spam don’t belong in your recommendations, and we’ve made changes to keep them out and protect the listening experience.”
The figure follows an earlier enforcement effort. Last year, according to the report, Spotify took down 75 million tracks that it said were serious or repeated violations of its rules. Those rules bar copying another creator's content and artificially generating media with technology.
Spotify says it relied partly on its own audience. The company studied patterns in songs that users often skipped or ignored over the past six months. Those tracks repeatedly overlapped with the kind of synthetic audio sometimes called slop.
Spotify then combined that listener feedback with metadata and third-party AI detection tools. It used the results to update its internal recommendation system so that AI-generated content appears less often.
The company acknowledged that detection technology has limits. It also said that spotting suspicious content may become harder as generative AI continues to develop. The challenge for streaming services is considerable, since they must catch impersonation and deception among tens of millions of tracks.
The issue touches how musicians are paid. Artists on Spotify earn money based in part on how often their music is played compared with total streams on the platform. More AI material therefore means a larger pool of streams for each artist's share to be measured against.
Morgan Hayduck, CEO of Beatdapp, which sells AI and fraud detection software to music labels and distributors, described the effect this way: “If the denominator has grown because of AI slop, the percentage that each legitimate rights holder or artist will receive is diminished.”
There is one built-in barrier. To qualify for royalties on Spotify, an artist must reach at least 1,000 streams. NBC News reported that AI tracks are much less likely to reach that level than human-made music.
Not every artist who uses AI is producing what Spotify would consider slop. For those cases, the company introduced an AI Credits feature earlier this year. Artists can use it to disclose which parts of a song's creation involved AI.
Spotify also marks the profiles of musicians it believes are AI-generated with an AI Persona badge. By default, these artists are left out of user recommendation streams. A listener sees such a persona recommended only after choosing to follow that artist.
Spotify says these steps have led to a “marked decrease” in listener complaints about AI spam in their recommendations. The company was candid about the road ahead. “AI moves fast and bad actors adapt just as fast,” it said, adding, “But as AI makes music more abundant, we believe listeners will value human artistry even more.”
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