Spotify removes over 50 million tracks from recommendation system
The songs remain available to stream. Spotify has separately deleted more than 75 million spam tracks for serious or repeated rule-breaking.
Spotify says its recommendation system now excludes more than 50 million tracks classified as AI-generated “slop” or spam, following changes made over six months. Listeners can still access those recordings, but they receive no recommendations from either the platform’s editors or its algorithms.
The company provided no breakdown showing how many affected tracks used AI rather than falling into other spam categories. Separately, Spotify said serious or repeated breaches of its rules had prompted it to delete more than 75 million spam tracks.
According to Spotify, recordings flagged by its systems consistently matched those that listeners skipped, ignored or rejected. It reported a decline in listener complaints following the recommendation changes. Detection combines upload patterns and listening behavior with track information and outside AI-detection tools, though Spotify acknowledged limits to those tools and said detection would become harder as AI improves.
Since announcing AI-music rules a year earlier, Spotify has given human-artist verification badges to more than 300,000 acts. Thousands of AI-generated artists carry labels and are excluded from recommendations by default, the company said.
Spotify also reported that suspected AI-generated recordings were ten times more likely to remain below its royalty eligibility threshold of 1,000 streams annually. Other services have reported changes involving AI music: Deezer said in July that AI-generated recordings represented more than half of daily uploads, while TIDAL has ended royalty payments for fully AI-generated tracks.
