Good News! Spotify Removed 75 Million AI-Generated Slop Music Tracks
As everyone knows, there are a lot of songs on Spotify, probably more than you can listen to in a hundred lifetimes. I’ve never heard anyone having a problem with that. What we all have a problem with is when AI-generated slop music tracks fill up the pipeline and push legitimate artists out of the way. Thankfully, the streamer has finally done something about it.
The company recently announced that it removed around 75 million spammy music tracks in the last 12 months, which is good news for both artists and listeners.
There’s The Competition Issue
For artists, this has meant not only increased competition, but the fact that these tracks are also taking a piece of the royalty pie, leaving less for the humans that have slaved over their legitimate art.
As the company says, “Total music payouts on Spotify have grown from $1B in 2014 to $10B in 2024. But big payouts entice bad actors. Spam tactics such as mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other forms of slop have become easier to exploit as AI tools make it simpler for anyone to generate large volumes of music.”
AI Fraud’s The Thing
A huge part of the problem is when a human artist of any stature has songs that gain some traction, an AI impersonator swoops in with a copy of the song and deflects a portion of the royalties and streams away.
In order to at least put a finger in the dike, Spotify says that it will roll out a new AI music spam filter in the fall. If it works as planed, the system will identify AI impersonator uploaders and tracks, tag them, and stop recommending them.
Personally I think the penalty is too light, but to be fair, the company wants to be sure that’s it’s not being too aggressive and end up penalizing hardworking artists that are completely innocent.
To be clear, they will not be singling out music that uses AI as an assistant, like for noise reduction, helping with EQ, or any other production use. This is aimed strictly at 100% AI-generated slop music.
There’s actually quite a lot of news breaking on the AI slop prevention front at the moment, so stay tuned for more updates.
