{"id":5502,"date":"2025-09-26T18:07:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T18:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/spotify-admits-overrun-ai-slop\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T18:07:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T18:07:11","slug":"spotify-admits-overrun-ai-slop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/spotify-admits-overrun-ai-slop\/","title":{"rendered":"Spotify\u2019s Attempt to Fight AI Slop Falls on Its Face"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s been clear for a while that a deluge of AI slop<\/a> is drowning out real music and human artists on Spotify.<\/p>\n

The platform has become overrun by bots and AI-spun trickery, which have actively been scamming revenue from real bands<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, a self-proclaimed \u201cindie rock band\u201d called The Velvet Sundown<\/a> racked up millions of streams<\/a> on the streaming service using AI-generated songs. Weeks later, the company was caught<\/a> populating the profiles of long-dead artists with new AI-generated songs<\/a> that have nothing to do with them.<\/p>\n

Now Spotify has finally acknowledged the problem, announcing new policies<\/a> to protect artists against \u201cspam, impersonation, and deception.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt its worst, AI can be used by bad actors and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, push \u2018slop\u2019 into the ecosystem, and interfere with authentic artists working to build their careers,\u201d the company wrote. \u201cThat kind of harmful AI content degrades the user experience for listeners and often attempts to divert royalties to bad actors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spotify head of marketing and policy Sam Duboff told reporters at a press briefing that 15 record labels and music distributors had committed to the changes already, The Verge <\/em>reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The company is also planning to roll out a new spam filter that can detect common tactics used by spammers to game Spotify\u2019s royalties system.<\/p>\n

\u201cLeft unchecked, these behaviors can dilute the royalty pool and impact attention for artists playing by the rules,\u201d the company wrote in its press release. <\/p>\n

But just one day later, a new AI scandal on Spotify showed the magnitude of the undertaking.<\/p>\n

The issue arose when an acclaimed and long-dormant side project by Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon, called Volcano Choir, unexpectedly uploaded a new single called \u201cSilkymoon Light\u201d after being on hiatus for more than a decade.<\/p>\n

The problem was that the track clearly wasn\u2019t a real Volcano Choir song<\/a> \u2014 and bore obvious hallmarks of AI generation, like robotic vocals and a glitchy album cover.<\/p>\n

After we reached out to the company with questions, it pulled down the fake song from Volcano Choir\u2019s page.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re aware of this issue and have removed the content,\u201d Spotify told us in a statement. \u201cThat change should be reflected on the platform soon. Across the music industry, AI is accelerating many of the problems that already exist \u2014 e.g. spam, fraud, and deceptive content \u2014 which is why we recently announced new policies aimed at making Spotify a more transparent, fair, and trustworthy platform for artists and listeners.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause music flows through a complex supply chain of labels and distributors, bad actors can sometimes exploit gaps in the system to push incorrect content onto artist profiles,\u201d it continued. \u201cWe\u2019re testing new prevention tactics with leading artist distributors to equip them to better stop these attacks at the source, and investing more resources into our content mismatch process, reducing the wait time for review, and enabling artists to report \u2018mismatch\u2019 even in the pre-release state.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, Spotify may be on board to clean up its platform, but the technical hurdles are clearly immense.<\/p>\n

The use of AI in the music industry has become a major point of contention, especially when it comes to impersonation. We\u2019ve seen countless<\/a> tracks featuring the cloned vocals of famous music artists go viral online, a trend that has already resulted in prolonged legal battles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to Spotify\u2019s impersonation policy<\/a>, the company says it will \u201cremove music\u201d if it\u2019s found to be replicating \u201canother artist\u2019s voice without that artist\u2019s permission,\u201d even when it\u2019s labeled as being an \u201c\u2018AI version\u2019 of the artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSome artists may choose to license their voices to AI projects \u2014 and that\u2019s their choice to make,\u201d the company\u2019s press release reads. \u201cOur job is to do what we can to ensure that the choice stays in their hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company will be working with the Digital Data Exchange (DDEX), a not-for-profit dedicated to the creation of digital music value chain standards, to establish common \u201cAI disclosures in music credits.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs this information is submitted through labels, distributors, and music partners, we\u2019ll begin displaying it across the app,\u201d the statement reads.<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen whether Spotify\u2019s new policies will stem a tidal wave of AI slop proliferating on its platform, let alone whether they\u2019ll be meaningfully enforced in the future. <\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not clear how Spotify will ferret out artists that don\u2019t cop to their use of AI. Initially, the Velvet Underground denied it was using the tech<\/a>, but eventually updated its bio on Spotify, referring to itself as an \u201congoing artistic provocation<\/a>\u201d that made considerable use of AI.<\/p>\n

Even after all that drama, The Velvet Sundown\u2019s music can still be streamed on Spotify. Some of its lazily generated songs have amassed over three million listens to date, generating royalties that could\u2019ve easily gone to human musicians instead.<\/p>\n

More on AI music:<\/strong> Startup Using AI to Bring Whitney Houston Back on Tour 13 Years After Her Death<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Spotify\u2019s Attempt to Fight AI Slop Falls on Its Face<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s been clear for a while that a deluge of AI slop is drowning out real music and human artists on Spotify. The platform has become overrun by bots and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3867,177,3841,3842],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-artificial-intelligence","category-ethics","category-future-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}