Spotify says it has taken more than 50 million AI-generated “slop” and spam tracks out of its recommendations this year, on top of 75 million spam tracks it has deleted. It found these were the tracks listeners skipped or rejected most. Spotify did not say how many of the 50 million were made with AI.
Spotify has taken more than 50 million AI-generated “slop” and spam tracks out of its recommendations this year, the company said on Tuesday. The songs are still on the service, but Spotify’s algorithms and editors no longer suggest them to listeners.
That is on top of more than 75 million spam tracks Spotify says it has deleted outright for serious or repeated rule-breaking. The company did not say how many of the 50 million tracks were made with AI and how many were other kinds of spam.
Spotify said it looked at the songs listeners skipped, ignored or said they did not want to hear. These were consistently tracks its systems had flagged as slop or spam. Over the past six months, it changed its recommendations to remove them, and says complaints from listeners have dropped since.
To spot slop, Spotify combines several signals, including listener behaviour, upload patterns, track data and third-party AI detection tools. It admitted AI detection “has limitations” and will get harder as the technology improves.
The update marks a year since Spotify set out new rules on AI music. Since then, it has added a verified badge for human artists, now held by more than 300,000 acts. It also labels thousands of AI-generated artists and keeps them out of recommendations by default.
Spotify also said tracks likely to be AI-generated are ten times more likely to earn fewer than 1,000 streams a year. That is the minimum a track needs to earn royalties on the service.
The problem is growing across the industry. More than half the music uploaded to Deezer each day is now made with AI, the French service said in July. TIDAL has gone further than Spotify, cutting off royalties for fully AI-generated tracks.
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