Why doesn’t Spotify label AI music?
Posted On
(Credits: Far Out / Spotify)
Artificial intelligence seems to have proliferated at an intense, unavoidable speed, and the music industry has been no stranger to its impact.
Earlier this year, a band called The Velvet Sundown dropped two albums’ worth of psych-rock music. Appearing on Spotify users’ Discover Weekly curations and third-party playlists, they garnered millions of streams in just a few weeks – only to reveal that they weren’t real, but rather, a “synthetic music project” created using AI.
Subsequent controversy prompted The Velvet Sundown’s official page to update its Spotify biography, admitting that all of their music was composed and voiced by artificial intelligence. They referred to their project as: “An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”
Similarly, last month, the Welsh rock band Holding Absence spoke out after learning that an AI band, Bleeding Verse, modelled itself after them. Bleeding Verse’s YouTube channel description names the Welsh band as an inspiration and acknowledges using “AI assisted instrumentation and vocals”.
In response, Holding Absence’s frontman Lucas Woodland said on X, “It’s shocking, it’s disheartening, it’s insulting – most importantly – it’s a wake up call. Oppose AI music, or bands like us stop existing.”
In another post, Woodland called for action, stating, “I believe we can only lobby for transparency now. Those artists should have AI on their Spotify artwork, so that playlists can’t sneak them onto playlists. Otherwise, violently support real music. Buy merch. Attend shows. That’s the most we can do for now.”
Spotify boasts over 770 million monthly listeners and, with recent profits of $669million for 2025’s third quarter, the Swedish platform remains the most popular streaming service globally. Still, that does not mean that the company has been strangers to controversy. Most recently, several artists have withdrawn their discography from the platform in protest of its AI endorsement and its financial shortcomings. Led by Australian rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in July, they said of their decision to boycott: “A PSA to those unaware: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invests millions in AI military drone technology. We just removed our music from the platform.”
Bands then requested to have their catalogue removed from the platform, including the English trip hop collective Massive Attack, who stated, “The economic burden that has long been placed on artists is now compounded by a moral & ethical burden, whereby the hard-earned money of fans & the creative endeavours of musicians ultimately funds lethal, dystopian technologies.”
Daniel Ek has been open about his positive belief in AI, hoping that the technology will assist Spotify’s algorithm in matching listeners’ tastes and, in the future, bridge language barriers in real-time, as he detailed to the New York Post. Still, the platform has not moved to label AI-generated content, prompting questions of transparency for listeners and the potential issues that could arise for the former as well as creatives.
In a written statement to NPR, which posed questions of whether Spotify has considered implementing detection or labelling systems for AI-generated music (and what challenges can arise from this), a Spotify spokesperson said: “Spotify doesn’t police the tools artists use in their creative process. We believe artists and producers should be in control. Our platform policies focus on how music is presented to listeners, and we actively work to protect against deception, impersonation, and spam. Content that misleads listeners, infringes on artists’ rights, or abuses the platform will be penalized or taken down.”
While projects like The Velvet Sundown and Bleeding Verse are not impersonating another artist and therefore are not violating any of Spotify’s rules, the lack of distinction between human musicians and AI-generated ones means there is no caution as to what listeners are being exposed to. Whether consumers mind artificial content or not, the knowledge of such is warranted to continue ethical media consumption, especially considering the widening profits that Spotify has garnered as a result.
The acknowledgement of AI-generated content is a possibility. Fellow streaming company Deezer introduced its AI detection and tagging system in June. The company’s head of research, Manuel Moussallam, told NPR that approximately 20% of the songs (nearly 30,000) uploaded to Deezer daily are AI-generated, though much of it is essentially spam.
Detection warranted the removal of AI-generated songs from automated and curated playlists to gauge listeners’ streaming numbers, and revealed that approximately 70% of the streams were fraudulent. Essentially, people created both fake artists and streaming bots to receive payouts; in response, Deezer excludes fraudulent streams from royalty payments.
Still rather nascent, AI has already become increasingly difficult to identify at a moment’s notice. There is a responsibility, then, from platforms such as Spotify to clearly label AI-generated content, particularly as the technology continues to expand at an unprecedented pace. It appears that the potential for technological advancement has outweighed prioritising transparency for artists and listeners, both of whom have demanded open communication for years. The question remains of how consumers can maintain their autonomy over their art and listening habits. The labelling of content could be a start.
Related Topics
