Cleaning Up
The streaming service cut the slop tracks in favor of "more music made by authentic, human artists," with 50 million more being filtered from recommendations made to listeners
Spotify is making room for more real music as it scrapes more than 75 million songs identified as “slop or spam” from the streaming service. The removed releases were flagged as having made “serious or repeated violations of our rules,” the platform shared in its one-year update on the plans it made to put AI protections in place for artists, songwriters, and producers.
An additional 50 million songs have been filtered out of recommendations for users following repeated complaints regarding quality. “We looked closely at the tracks listeners were skipping, ignoring, or telling us they didn’t want to hear,” Spotify shared in a recent newsletter. “A clear pattern emerged: these tracks were consistently ones identified as slop or spam.”
Prioritizing “more music made by authentic, human artists” has become a greater priority for Spotify over the past six months. Editors at the streaming service “hold the same standard and don’t program content identified as slop or spam,” the newsletter states, while additional filtering to decrease poor recommendations to users relies on “listener engagement and feedback, upload patterns, metadata, and information from multiple third-party AI detection tools.”
It takes time to develop proper detection tools. In the meantime, AI continues to evolve in music. Spotify acknowledges that “it will only get harder as generative AI evolves,” but remains committed to keeping its pulse on new tactics, like “mass uploads, duplicates, SEO manipulation, spammy playlist networks, and artificially short tracks.”
Spotify competitor Tidal announced plans earlier this year to identify and tag music found to be almost completely AI-generated. These labeled releases are allowed to exist on the platform, but not eligible for monetization. Spotify and Apple Music both previously rolled out features to identify AI-generated content, but the approach relied largely on transparency from artists and their distributors.
Spotify notes that 300,000 artists are now verified on the platform. Their profiles contain a badge to signal to listeners there is a “real, identifiable person” behind the music. Music uploaded by what the service is calling “AI Personas” are being marked with a separate badge. “AI Personas are excluded from editorial or algorithmic recommendations by default, unless a listener follows an AI Persona, for example,” Spotify said.
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Further protections include the beta program Artist Profile Protection, which allows artists to review releases delivered to Spotify under their name to avoid impersonation and stream-farming. The service reports thousands of participants already with plans to open up access to more artists by the end of the year. On the fan side, Spotify has also launched a feature to list AI contributions to a song in its credits, which can be viewed directly in the app.
Removing AI slop from streaming seems to be becoming an elaborate game of Whack-a-Mole, but Spotify is down to play.