Spotify wants to crack down on “spammy” songs made with AI by “bad actors” who are diverting royalties from actual artists. In a For The Record post on its website, Spotify shared that it had removed 75 million tracks from the platform in the past 12 months.
“The pace of recent advances in generative AI technology has felt quick and at times unsettling, especially for creatives,” the post began. “At its best, AI is unlocking incredible new ways for artists to create music and for listeners to discover it. At its worst, AI can be used by bad actors and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, push ‘slop’ into the ecosystem, and interfere with authentic artists working to build their careers.”
The post continued, “That kind of harmful AI content degrades the user experience for listeners and often attempts to divert royalties to bad actors. The future of the music industry is being written, and we believe that aggressively protecting against the worst parts of Gen AI is essential to enabling its potential for artists and producers.”
Spotify Gets Rid of Bad AI But Makes Room For the Technology In the Future
Spotify added, “We envision a future where artists and producers are in control of how or if they incorporate AI into their creative processes. As always, we leave those creative decisions to artists themselves, while continuing our work to protect them against spam, impersonation, and deception, and providing listeners with greater transparency about the music they hear.”
AI slop has been a hot topic since the technology’s explosion in the past few years. The speed with which AI has developed is daunting and concerning not only for artists, but for anyone with a job that takes any sort of brain power or creativity. People are losing long-held positions to AI left and right as more companies embrace the technology. Spotify is just one platform of many that has come up against AI slop.
Rather than banning AI use altogether—because no one seems to want to do that—Spotify is promising to put more protections in place.
“We’ve introduced a new impersonation policy that clarifies how we handle claims about AI voice clones (and other forms of unauthorized vocal impersonation), giving artists stronger protections and clearer recourse,” Spotify stated. “Vocal impersonation is only allowed in music on Spotify when the impersonated artist has authorized the usage.”
New Policies and Filters Put In Place to Protect Artists and Listeners From AI Slop and Spam
Spotify’s new spam filtering techniques will hopefully protect actual artists as well as listeners from harmful AI generated music. At its worst, AI strips people of their livelihoods, deceives consumers, and threatens the integrity of the art. At its best, it just really sucks.
But while outright banning AI from music seems to be a step too far for Spotify—it is the future after all, supposedly—the new policies could potentially keep the wolves from the door for a while at least.
Other than identifying fraudulent music uploaded to existing artists’ profiles and culling the library of spam, Spotify is identifying known techniques in AI music. These include “mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other forms of slop.” The goal of this is to “identify uploaders and tracks engaging in these tactics, tag them, and stop recommending them.”
Additionally, Spotify is looking to keep things transparent by clearly labeling tracks that use AI. The post stated that they’re not looking to simply label songs “AI” or “Not AI.” Instead, the process would be more nuanced.
“We know the use of AI tools is increasingly a spectrum, not a binary, where artists and producers may choose to use AI to help with some parts of their productions and not others,” Spotify wrote. The goal is to make the use of AI transparent so listeners know what they’re engaging with.
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