Spotify’s war on AI slop has already wiped tens of millions of fake tracks

The proliferation of AI-generated music has been a common problem among popular music streaming services in recent years. Much to the chagrin of users, these tracks have been invading recommendations. YouTube Music recently introduced AI labels to bring some much-needed transparency to the matter. Spotify, on the other hand, has taken a much stronger approach to the issue.

The company has been actively removing AI-generated music from users’ recommendations. According to Spotify, it has removed over 50 million AI slop and spam tracks from recommendations over the last year. And the streamer’s efforts reportedly go much further than that. Spotify claims that in addition to removing 50 million slop and spam tracks from recommendations, it has also removed over 75 million spam songs from the platform entirely.

To accomplish this, Spotify says it has updated its recommendation system multiple times over the past six months to surface more music made by human artists. The rollout of features like AI Credits (labels the roles and instruments made by AI), AI Persona badges, verification for human artists, and more has also played a role in Spotify’s deterrence.

Spotify ends the blog by mentioning the Artist Profile Protection feature it rolled out in beta back in March. This feature allows a user to review releases that list them as an artist, giving them the final say on what appears on their profile. The company says that it plans to make this feature available to all artists by the end of the year.