The Spam Extermination
As part of its AI policy overhaul, Spotify revealed that it had deleted over 75 million tracks it deemed as spam in the past year. Besides the culling, mostly consisting of AI tracks, the platform revealed a host of new policies surrounding AI music to prevent fraud while still permitting creative uses of the technology.
New AI Policies
Following in the footsteps of rival platforms like Deezer, Spotify has developed new updates to its AI music policy, which include better enforcement against AI vocal impersonation, the development of an “industry standard” for AI disclosures for music, and an automated spam filtering system targeting accounts that upload tracks suspiciously in bulk, tracks just slightly long enough to receive royalties, and tracks with altered metadata. The platform will also ramp up enforcement to discourage spam from being uploaded to other artists’ profiles.
Spotify’s Statement
“At its worst, AI can be used by bad actors and content farms to confuse or deceive listeners, push ‘slop’ into the ecosystem, and interfere with authentic artists working to build their careers,” Spotify said in a statement explaining the philosophy behind the new policy. “That kind of harmful AI content degrades the user experience for listeners and often attempts to divert royalties to bad actors. The future of the music industry is being written, and we believe that aggressively protecting against the worst parts of Gen AI is essential to enabling its potential for artists and producers.”
Shifting Spam Trends
Music platforms have seen an unprecedented increase in AI-generated tracks being uploaded in the past year, with Deezer reporting that its AI detection tool receives notice of 30,000 new AI-generated tracks being uploaded per day. Of these tracks, an average of 70% of plays for them have been detected as fraudulent (i.e., played primarily by bots). For Deezer, they prevent tracks from receiving royalties from fraudulent streams.
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