The Spotify AI slop debacle has dragged on longer than it should have, and despite the company rolling out measures to counter the spread of AI-generated music, some users are still wielding their pitchforks and torches over the controversy.
I came across a recent Reddit post on the ir/truespotify forum that brought attention to the artist page of Selah Stone – an apparently AI-generated artist. But it wasn’t the artist the poster had a problem with; instead, they decided to shadow Spotify, claiming that the platform has “created fake bios and images to hide AI artists and further confuse users”.
Now, I’m all for pressuring the top music streaming services to tighten their AI detection measures, but what the user addressed is completely out of Spotify’s hands, and I’m not the only one who thinks these conspiracy theories are getting tiresome.
While AI slop is becoming more apparent to some users (I haven’t encountered it myself), Spotify isn’t the one uploading AI-generated music, nor is it creating the artist profiles that come with it. Every song and album uploaded to Spotify is an act of the artist and their team, or in the case of an AI artist, the person behind that facade.
The thing to remember is that Spotify does not take direct music uploads. When a (human) artist shares music to Spotify (or any music streaming platform for that matter), it’s all processed through their label or distributor. Since Spotify launched its new ‘Verified by Spotify’ labels for artist profiles, another layer of assurance has been added that the artist you’re listening to isn’t AI.
The same goes for AI artists, and even the music they generate cannot go directly through Spotify. Similarly, they must also use a distributor, with some common ones including DistroKid and Ditto Music – but the blame doesn’t end there.
Another AI conspiracy doing the rounds is that Spotify makes more money by allowing users to curate a number of AI-generated music. This is not the case because of how Spotify’s royalty and payout system works.
All subscriber fees are put into a pool, and from there the artists with the highest streaming numbers receive a larger portion of these payouts. While it’s not the fairest way to pay artists (even if you don’t stream Taylor Swift, your money goes to her and not necessarily the artists you actually listen to), and it puts indie artists at a disadvantage, AI-generated artists don’t make a ton of money even if they record places where human artists need fixing, something I agree with.
In addition, Spotify paid out 70% of its annual revenue by 2025 to artists and rights holders, so the majority of the money it makes from subscriptions goes directly back into the industry, and what’s left is invested back into the company.
I don’t think such complaints are the real reasons why users are bothered. Instead, I think Spotify’s transparency issues are the cause of many users’ frustration. But because the platform hasn’t been the most transparent about AI music, irritation among users has reached boiling point, prompting them to come up with ridiculous conspiracies – and now they’ll be pointing fingers everywhere to find new reasons to blame Spotify for the increasing presence of AI slop.
Like many users in the Reddit responses, I also agree that Spotify needs to do a lot more to flag AI-generated music. I think that while the platform has tried to do something good with its online reporting resources and new Verified by Spotify badges for artists, other services came first.
But the finger-pointing has to stop at some point – and conspiracy theorists must either produce clear evidence to support their claims or shut up.
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