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Spotify has removed more than 50 million tracks that appear to be AI-generated from its music recommendations this year, part of an effort to stop machine-made songs from crowding out human artists on the world’s biggest audio streaming service, the company said Tuesday.
The company said the tracks, which it calls AI slop and spam, don’t belong in listeners’ recommendations. "We’ve made changes to keep them out and protect the listening experience," Spotify said in a statement.
The announcement comes as streaming platforms struggle with a surge of AI-generated content. They must find impersonation and deception among tens of millions of tracks.
Last year, Spotify removed 75 million tracks for what it described as serious or repeated violations of its rules, which ban copying another creator’s work or artificially generating media.
To spot the new wave, Spotify turned to its own users. It studied tracks that listeners often skipped or ignored over the past six months and found that they consistently overlapped with AI-generated audio.
It combined that feedback with track metadata and third-party AI-detection tools, then updated its recommendation system to limit how often such content appears.
The company acknowledged that detection technology has limits and that spotting suspicious material may get harder as generative AI improves.
Spotify pays royalties partly based on how often a musician’s tracks are played compared with total streams on the platform, so a flood of AI content can shrink everyone else’s share.
"If the denominator has grown because of AI slop, the percentage that each legitimate rights holder or artist will receive is diminished," said Morgan Hayduk, CEO of Beatdapp, a company that sells AI- and fraud-detection software to music labels and distributors.
Artists must reach at least 1,000 streams to earn royalties on Spotify, a threshold that AI tracks reach far less often than human-made music does.
Not all AI use is treated as spam. Earlier this year, Spotify introduced an AI credits feature that lets artists disclose which parts of a song’s creation involved AI.
It now marks artist profiles it believes are AI-generated with an "AI Persona" badge. Those artists are left out of recommendation streams by default, and only listeners who follow them directly will see them suggested.
Spotify said the measures have led to a "marked decrease" in listener complaints about AI spam in their recommendations.
"AI moves fast and bad actors adapt just as fast," the company said. "But as AI makes music more abundant, we believe listeners will value human artistry even more."
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