Spotify says it has pulled more than 50 million tracks that appear to be AI-generated “slop” and spam from its curated music recommendations so far this year.
To find them, the company looked at songs listeners frequently skipped or ignored over the past six months and found those tracks consistently overlapped with AI-generated audio, NBC News reports. Spotify combined that listener signal with metadata and third-party AI-detection tools to update its recommendation system, while acknowledging that detection has limits and could get harder as the technology improves.
The issue matters for artists’ pay, since royalties depend partly on a track’s share of total streams. Beatdapp CEO Morgan Hayduk told NBC that when AI slop inflates the total, every legitimate rights holder’s share shrinks. Spotify requires at least 1,000 streams for a track to earn royalties, a bar AI tracks hit far less often than human-made music.
Spotify has also added AI credits that let artists disclose how they used AI, and an “AI Persona” badge on profiles it believes are AI-generated, which are left out of recommendations by default. The company says listener complaints about AI spam in recommendations have dropped noticeably. Last year it removed 75 million tracks for serious or repeated rule violations.
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