Spotify is full of AI music

Related more recently:<p><i>Ghost artists on Spotify</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42461530">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42461530</a>

I noticed this and the ghost artists in my recommendations after playing some ambient.<p>I&#x27;m done with Spotify. I&#x27;ve had the service since it was beta in the Nordics, maybe 2008? It was amazing to be able to stream almost every piece of music there is.<p>I love music, I&#x27;m an amateur musician and I respect artists. This treats music as a fungible commodity. That&#x27;s not what music is to me, so I choose not to support that.<p>I also understand the predicament they are in. I had friends who worked at Rdio, and I briefly worked at a startup doing music recommendation until the big 3 quoted us how much royalties they wanted <i>in advance</i> to stream their catalogue one time to learn from.<p>The record labels are the root cancer on the industry, but the alternative for Spotify might be to become a better label, not become another bad actor.

Spotify&#x27;s app is bloated. I&#x27;ve been premium since 2014 but I&#x27;m reaching my limit of all the garbage the app has. I wish I could deactivate all podcasts and audiobooks. I don&#x27;t care about it. I don&#x27;t mind AI music and ghost artists but I wish looking for some sort of music would bring up playlists from actual people instead of the bubble generated AI from Spotify. I feel instead of exploring and expanding my limits when I search for music I&#x27;m just self padding myself.

Not just AI music, but &quot;ghost artists&quot;, which are real people paid bottom dollar to create generic playlist music in a theme, under a different name. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomsguide.com&#x2F;entertainment&#x2F;music-streaming&#x2F;spotify-accused-of-pushing-ghost-artists-into-our-playlists-heres-whats-going-on" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomsguide.com&#x2F;entertainment&#x2F;music-streaming&#x2F;spot...</a>

At the end of the day, Spotify&#x27;s north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed; and to get that metric as low as possible. That&#x27;s why they push podcasts so hard (and why they aren&#x27;t in a separate app); Premium subscribers barely noticed when they still get ads in podcasts, beautiful double-dipping Spotify! It&#x27;s why they want to get big into audiobooks; they&#x27;re going to be a keystone in their justification for an even higher $20+&#x2F;mo subscription.<p>Netflix was well on the same course; but instead made what was absolutely <i>not</i> an obvious pivot at the time, to just become a studio like those dozen other guys. In retrospect, it was a genius move because their access to fine-grained data on what their users watch became a differentiating factor to feed back into what the studio greenlights. But, it would have been the right move even if they didn&#x27;t capitalize on that data, because there genuinely is no business to be built being a middle-man who has to pay for content. Spotify knows this, but they don&#x27;t have the same escape hatch Netflix had; but they&#x27;re tearing their app and users apart trying to find one.

The logical conclusion is to also write AI viewers and listeners. But on YouTube that would be called click fraud.<p>Seems like the whole online industry is eliminating itself and cheering all the way down.

Before articles about this started to show up on the web, I&#x27;ve noticed that my weekly suggestion playlist (which refreshes every monday) sometimes had music with either low quality or encoding artifacts (just like AI music).<p>But after reading about this phenomenon, I also started to dig deeper into which artists were actually suggested each week. And to my surprise there were quite a bit of artists I&#x27;ve never heard of, and were hard to find further information on.<p>Hopefully Spotify won&#x27;t touch weekly release playlist (the one which refreshes every friday) of artists you already listen to and have saved into personal playlists.

This article is trash. Here’s the original reporting expose you want to read: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;harpers.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;harpers.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;the-ghosts-in-the-machin...</a><p>Money quote:<p>&gt; Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.

People who care about music listen to specific artists the know, not some AI-slop auto-generated playlist.

AI-generated music can be acceptable in certain contexts, such as white noise for coding, running, or working out, where the primary goal is background ambiance rather than active listening.<p>However, AI-generated fake podcasts are a different story—they&#x27;re often frustrating and a waste of people&#x27;s time.<p>Unfortunately, platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify are increasingly populated with these spammy, AI-created podcasts. For those interested, here&#x27;s a small subset (4,000+) of such AI-generated fake podcasts available on Kaggle: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kaggle.com&#x2F;datasets&#x2F;listennotes&#x2F;ai-generated-fake-podcasts-spams" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kaggle.com&#x2F;datasets&#x2F;listennotes&#x2F;ai-generated-fak...</a>.

So happy that I never stopped curating my digital music collection. Old raspberry pi with USB DAC and external HD, connected to good old hifi amplifier, and controlled via mpd from anyone&#x27;s phone. It&#x27;s been working wonders for almost 10 years.

I&#x27;ve been listening to the radio a lot more recently; there&#x27;s a few channels, such as my local university&#x27;s non profit&#x2F;commercial free radio station that often play some pretty obscure and interesting things, I&#x27;ve discovered a lot of new music that I otherwise never would have listened to.

It’s awful. They absolutely need to introduce a toggle to turn it off.

I used to write music in the past, and I mostly do it to tell stories or a songification of a poem. When I lived alone, it was easy because I can record anytime I wanted in full silence. Now that I am with family, I can’t record without a background noise seeping on my vocals.<p>I found that AI helped a lot, I can still write the story, the poem, the lyrics - and just let AI find a melody that represent the story as close as how I imagined it on my mind.<p>I mostly design and write the story first, then captures the story as poem or lyrics, then let AI “cover” it for me. I don’t want AI to write for me because the story and lyrics is what I cared about, and I like to put metaphors and hidden messages on it.<p>For example, this album that tells about the phases of life as seasons is AI generated.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;RlCY67Nbubk?si=2HQEyH5MiAnGeW4r" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;RlCY67Nbubk?si=2HQEyH5MiAnGeW4r</a>

I’ve had a pretty negative reaction to AI-produced music, too. But I will say that the following track caught my ear when it appeared on my YouTube video feed a few days ago:<p>“Nirvana Tribute ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Girl Group 1960’s Tribute”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qwSeVM1g9hs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qwSeVM1g9hs</a><p>At first I thought it was a real singer, but then I remembered how convincing the lastest text-to-music services are becoming.<p>“Stairway to Heaven” in a similar style:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dldL3tTtr-8&amp;t=605s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dldL3tTtr-8&amp;t=605s</a>

I still prefer radio (SiriusXM cause I don&#x27;t like commercials) it has the right mix of new, &quot;b-tracks&quot;, favorites, genres etc all without having to curate it oneself and end up with things like random AI music spam or the random unrelated track someone sneaked in to game some algorithm or whatever. Also prefer to attend smaller music festivals or live music gigs over large concerts. I just don&#x27;t want to go wading through the massive amount of random music spending way too much time trying to create playlist when certain radio already does a good job of balancing new with old and far more quality than not.

I feel like a lot of companies &#x2F; services that were popular and loved once are going to make greedy mistakes with AI, so it would be a business opportunity to launch a &quot;more ethical&quot; alternative.

What I don’t get about Spotify is how bad their interface is. They have an army of engineers and yet over 15 years it has only become harder and less efficient to use. I constantly see regressive tweaks or bugs. What’s the best way to reliably export all my playlists and move on?

I use Spotify to listen to Louis Cole and his contemporaries only at this point. And children&#x27;s music for my son. Spotify was lovely in 2014-2015 when it made it truly was to discover new musicians. Now it&#x27;s barf. Once my son is more grown, I&#x27;ll be done with it.

I&#x27;m surprised by how big this news story has been the past week or so, because I thought we all knew about Spotify&#x27;s fake music already. I remember reading about this program at least 6 years ago.<p>I haven&#x27;t used Spotify since.

I’ve noticed that nowadays, music often uses more generic melodies. Famous influencers, even without a background in music, can create songs for their fans.<p>Listening to retro music makes more sense to me these days.<p>Disclaimer: I’m not a musician.

Not having actually random shuffle is more important to me, but I’m only 50&#x2F;50 on Spotify right now despite being a premium member for a decade.<p>One wrong move, and one export&#x2F;import to another service and I’m gone.

Some of it’s pretty good. even a year ago the biggie cover of New York State of mind came out and I was quite impressed I suppose how you feel about it is irrelevant, time marches forward

I&#x27;m not sure if they&#x27;re AI but most playlists start strong with real artists but quickly devolve into ... generic slop. Going to give Apple Music a try.

Spotify is at the wrong end of the enshittification cycle.<p>I&#x27;ve experienced none of this on Deezer. They appear to still employ humans to curate playlists featuring actual artists, and as a nice bonus they support lossless audio like Spotify has been half promising for at least the last five years.

Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline.<p>I feel like the introduction of AI music is shortchanging musicians: musicians have made the AI generation possible, it pushes them aside, and they don&#x27;t get a cent from it.<p>Perhaps legal, but not in the spirit of fairness.

I like my music to be created the old fashioned way: using general MIDI on a Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card.