Spotify has admitted that they have had to remove an eye-watering 75 million AI-created ‘spam’ tracks from its platform over the past year.
To get some sense of the scale of the problem, it should be pointed out that the entirety of Spotify’s existing catalogue of songs stands at around the 100 million mark. The platform, then, is facing a battle to prevent itself from becoming overwhelmed by AI slop.
Why is this happening? Well, it takes just 30 seconds of a play to generate a royalty payment on Spotify. Though the payment per stream, as we know, is pitifully small, the advent of AI has enabled any determined individual to create industrial quantities of this low-quality garbage. Enough, anyway, to make a fair amount for virtually zero work.
Spotify has announced that it is taking measures to combat this, including a new spam filtering system to identify uploaders, tag them, and stop the tracks from being recommended by its algorithm. It is also strengthening its rules on ‘impersonation violations’ to crack down on fraudsters who create deepfakes of an artist, acting essentially as leeches on their reputation.
It also said that it would back a new industry standard for disclosing the use of AI in a track, developed by the music industry-backed non-profit organisation DDEX.
“This change is about strengthening trust across the platform,” Spotify said in a statement. “It’s not about punishing artists who use AI responsibly or down-ranking tracks for disclosing information about how they were made.”
Spotify’s move has been welcomed by the major labels. Universal Music Group said in a statement that it: “welcome[s] Spotify’s new AI protections as important steps forward consistent with our longstanding Artist Centric principles”.
It continued: “We believe AI presents enormous opportunities for both artists and fans, which is why platforms, distributors and aggregators must adopt measures to protect the health of the music ecosystem in order for these opportunities to flourish.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Warners said: “We appreciate and support Spotify on taking these steps to do just that and look forward to working with them on further safeguarding the rights of artists, songwriters and copyright owners.”
Spotify has sustained reputational damage on a number of fronts of late – not just because of their well-known stinginess when it comes royalty payments, but from Daniel Ek’s investment in military tech and its tardiness in dealing with AI fraudsters. It remains to be seen whether these latest measures will be enough to deal with the latter issue.
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