According to a recent blog post, the streaming giant Spotify is set to introduce new protective guidelines and policies to combat the increasing tide of “AI spam.” These tracks include but are not limited to impersonations, ultra-short clips, duplicates, or content mass-generated to exploit the company’s royalty thresholds. A significant change will be the introduction of a music spam filter, designed to tag or restrict these uploads from the recommendation algorithms.
One of Spotify’s central concerns is that the majority of these spam tracks are uploaded in hopes of collecting payouts with any stream played for more than 30 seconds generating a form of micro-royalties. This potentially diverts income away from legitimate artists. The sheer scale of the 75 million removals emphasises the challenge this poses to Spotify’s vast public catalogue.
Beyond spam filtering, Spotify is set to expand upon its existing policies around vocal impersonation and deepfakes, permitting such work only with direct authorisation from the original artist. The platform also plans to back up a voluntary disclosure standard (via DDEX), allowing any track to indicate how AI was used, whether in vocals, instrumentation, or post-production.
However, the company has also clearly stated that it is not banning AI music outright. Rather, it hopes to distinguish between responsible, creative experimental use and against exploitative practices. Spotify maintains that AI-generated content remains a minimal presence on the service and insists it is not significantly affecting overall streaming habits or royalties paid to human creators.
These measures arrive at a time when generative AI tools such as Suno and Udio have made it easier than ever to rapidly produce synthetic audio. This trend places not just Spotify, but all major streaming platforms under scrutiny as they confront the intertwined issues of authenticity, identity, and legitimacy in music catalogues.
For many artists, the new protections could provide a welcome safeguard against identity theft, diluted royalties, and uncredited mimicry. Yet questions remain: how well will the filters perform in practice? Will smaller independent creators be mistakenly caught in the dragnet? And will disclosure standards gain real traction across the industry, or stay voluntary and unevenly applied?
As Spotify begins rolling out these changes in the weeks ahead, the industry is watching closely. The debate over AI’s role in music is no longer theoretical—it is unfolding in real time, on one of streaming’s biggest stages.
