Spotify has pulled 50 million AI slop tracks from your recommendations this year

Spotify says it has taken more than 50 million AI slop and spam tracks out of its recommendations so far this year. The figure comes from a progress report published on October 20, a year after the company set out its rules for AI music, and it sits on top of more than 75 million spammy tracks Spotify says it has removed from the service altogether for serious or repeated rule breaks.

Taking a track out of recommendations is not the same as deleting it: the music can stay on Spotify, but it should no longer turn up in algorithmic picks or on editors’ playlists. Spotify, which says it has 777 million users in 184 markets, did not say how many of the 50 million tracks were fully AI-generated and how many were other kinds of spam.

The tracks listeners kept skipping

Spotify says the push started when it studied the songs people were skipping, ignoring or telling it they didn’t want to hear. Those tracks, it says, were consistently ones it had identified as slop or spam. Over the past six months it has made what it calls numerous updates to its recommendation system to drop that material and surface more music by human artists, and its editors now refuse to programme anything flagged as slop or spam.

Spotify says listener complaints about this content have fallen markedly since, though it gave no figures.

It also admits the job is getting harder. No single signal catches slop on its own, Spotify says, so it combines listener engagement and feedback, upload patterns, metadata and results from several third-party AI detection tools. It says AI detection “has limitations” and will only get harder as generative AI improves. It also looks for mass uploads, duplicates, search manipulation, spammy playlist networks and artificially short tracks.

Badges for AI artists and a royalty floor

The report rounds up the other tools Spotify has added in the past year:

• AI Credits: launched in April, artists now submit tens of thousands a day, showing which roles and instruments were made with AI. Listeners can see them in Song Credits in the mobile Now Playing view.
• AI Persona badges: thousands of artists whose identity is believed to be AI-generated are now labelled, and they are kept out of editorial and algorithmic recommendations by default unless a listener follows them. Spotify says it is the only major streaming service doing this.
• Verified by Spotify: more than 300,000 artists, covering over 99% of what people search for, now carry a badge showing a real, identifiable person is behind the music. More than 70% are independent.
• Artist Profile Protection: a beta that lets artists approve releases listing them before they appear on their page. Spotify says it will open to all artists by the end of the year.

Spotify also credits its 1,000-stream minimum for royalties, in place since 2024. It says tracks that show a high probability of being AI-generated are 10 times more likely to fall below that line, making it harder to siphon off payouts with music generated at scale. That is the kind of scheme behind the AI music fraud that sent Michael Smith to prison this month, after bots streamed his AI songs billions of times. Rivals are moving too: YouTube Music began labelling AI-generated songs in its player last week.

Fans get a licensed AI remix tool

On the same day, Spotify signed a licensing deal with Believe, the French music company that also owns the distributor TuneCore, for an upcoming tool that lets fans make AI-powered remixes and covers of songs. The tool is for reworking existing songs, not making entirely new ones, and streams of the remixes pay royalties to the original artists and rights holders. Spotify plans to sell it as a paid add-on for Premium subscribers; it has not given a price or a launch date.

Taking part is voluntary. Believe and TuneCore artists first opt in to being considered for AI programmes, then decide separately whether to join Spotify’s tool. Believe’s founder framed the deal as part of the same clean-up:

These efforts illustrate how we are working together to eradicate AI slop and make AI a value creator for music fans, artists and right-holders.

Denis Ladegaillerie, founder and CEO, Believe

Charlie Hellman, Spotify’s global head of music, said the deal “strengthens the momentum toward artist consent, compensation and credit”.

Why it matters

Fifty million tracks is a sign of how fast cheap AI music is flooding streaming services, and of how much of the fight now happens inside recommendation systems rather than through takedowns. Spotify is betting it can keep slop out of people’s feeds while selling AI remixes to the same listeners, and its own admission that detection is getting harder shows how fragile that balance is.

Sources: Spotify, “One Year In: Putting Human Artistry First on Spotify”; Spotify and Believe, licensing announcement.