The younger generation will split, as it always does, between AI-native and "hyperauthenticity" that rejects things even the previous generation accepted. Like how vinyl is outselling CDs.

Rather than focus on "Verified" streaming, I'd expect "AI reject" Gen Alphas to exclusively listen to live music generated through electromechanical devices.

Why should the young kids pay 20-30-40 dollars a month for Spotify to listen to AI-made music when you can make your own AI-made music with but a prompt from a free tier?

The fact is, AI is a thermonuclear device that everybody has at their disposal. That changes the power dynamics completely, and it is incorrect to believe we will maintain our exact commercial relationships but + AI.

Yes but there will be AI personalities in the near future too that I predict will be just as popular as real humans. I don't think people care too much if a personality it carbon based or silicon based. it'll be us old farts that'll be the ones telling the AI to get off our lawns.

Heh, people have an interest in other people. Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran or whoever is cool these days are popular because they are real people with real lives and histories that can be related to, followed over time, etc.

Of course the music matters, but the persona of who creates the music and their lore matters just as much. There’s a reason why live events are the moneymakers, people care about physicality.

No one gives a shit about AI music designed to make money, there’s no story to follow or be inspired by there.

All this was already tried with “digital idols” etc in the 2000s, the only one that had any lasting success was Hatsune Miku by virtue of being “first”.

Which generations? Even the most low tech older Millenials are using AI more and more.

I could see this especially if the tooling gets sharper and we mature beyond full-auto maximum slop per unit time to more reasonable AI-assisted workflows.

The difference between the indescribably saccharine images that come out of chat UIs versus watching someone with some artistic skills driving the slick comfyui [0] nodal editor around.

I can't unsee echoes of DALE-2 horrors that color my perception of post-2022 digital art, but it will be normal to my kids.

[0]: https://github.com/comfy-org/ComfyUI

From what I've seen it's the youngest generation who are most anti-AI slop at the moment. I don't see that changing. People like originality and authenticity. AI is not either of those and never will be. That's not to say the biggest pop stars in the world won't be using it - but they're inauthentic anyway.

> The more appropriate question is why they published a AI artist at all.

Because they allow anyone to upload to Spotify. There's nothing stopping me, you, or anyone from generating AI tracks with Suno & friends, downloading them, and using a service like LANDR or Amuse to distribute them to Spotify, all for free.

> Like Spotify owns distribution, their largest investor Tencent Music Entertainment Group publishes AI-generated music = almost infinite profit.

This assumes that real people are listening to AI-generated music which does not seem to be the case. According to Deezer, 85% of streams on AI-generated music are fraudulent.[0] It's largely a vanity ouroboros where someone with more money than sense generates a song, pays bots to get fraudulent streams, and uses those streams to generate vanity metrics. Consumers are by and large not listening to AI generated music.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/deezer-says-44-of-songs-up...

I would argue AI artists are antithetical to their business model, when people can generate their own versions of popular IP, they'll just use that.

i recall reading an article in the guardian or some other newspaper about some basically unknown companies that contract musicians to create stock background music for television. what was interesting is that they now create hyper-specialized music and ambience, which is then picked up by spotify for curated playlists. they create basically filler content, and for some reason these genre/mood playlists generate enough revenue from casual listeners so it is a worthwhile niche, and i guess that ai-generated music is the natural progression from that.

edit: it might've been this wikipedia page and some swedish newspaper i had read. i specifically remember Epidemic Sound, as the swedish state television sometimes uses them for stock sound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_...

They are paying the people uploading the AI music. They don’t care if they pay a real singer or someone that created a song with AI.

> I think Spotify (or its owners/investors) might actually benefit from recommending AI-generated music by not having to pay real artists.

You can remove the think and might; there were articles years ago saying Spotify actually commissioned artists to produce fairly generic songs for the highly played but passively listened to "background noise" playlists, so that Spotify would get the revenue / not pay real artists. I wouldn't be surprised if they replaced those commissioned productions with AI generated stuff to try and cut costs.

The thing about Spotify is that is NOT driven by record labels, it is an platform for the individual meaning an individual can upload their music in an laissez-faire situation.

If they disallow AI artists tomorrow, they are going against what they created the company for.

I would love to be able to filter out AI-generated music entirely. I stopped using Spotify's Discovery function as I can't bear this glitchy, really bad slop. It's like those "bad kitty" animations, but in music form. It's really insulting, both for the audience and artists, that they are promoting such lousy content. I hope that Spotify won't take the route of enshittification, quite literally.

That's every move Spotify has done recently.

Podcasts, audiobooks, AI music, and now an entire fitness hub - they really don't want to pay actual artists anything for their music while jacking up prices for everyone else.

(Oh, and sitting back and crying "app fairness" for quite some time, but it's odd that they haven't been complaining about Apple in a hot minute in the DSA fight yet still won't ship long overdue support like AirPlay 2...)

There are some decent AI songs out there, I’ve met a few people who can’t tell and don’t care that they are listening to AI music.

If it sounds good, why not allow it?

If I had to guess, three related factors:

1. Platforms like Suno lack the granular control that can make a song distinctive and interesting. A prompt is an all-or nothing paradigm. There is no gradual build towards a final result like in normal creative processes. Yes you can supply lyrics but that’s hardly a substitute. And on top of that it’s painfully slow due to the nature of the technology.

2. As a result of 1, experienced music producers (familiar with regular DAWs) don’t want to use it. They probably prefer something with instant feedback. Tweak a synth param, you can instantly hear its effect. And changing one instrument doesn’t randomly affect unrelated things.

3. As a result of 2, the majority of AI generated music is throwaway and or created by amateurs who don’t have the ear for what makes a song good.

Emulating the lowest common denominator is the function of an LLM. It works better for things like code because boring code is actually the best code.

I think it's because its main use in this particular context is to produce results that the creator does not have the skill to produce and/or does not want to invest the time to produce.

I guess you could argue that drum machines offered simplification/automation when they first appeared compared to the option of a human drummer, but also, those machines opened up all sorts of creative and stylistic possibilities that simply couldn't be done by sitting someone at a traditional drum kit. Using AI to make music doesn't do this -- it's a shortcut that has no argument in its favor whatsoever except that it saved the person making it time (and/or enabled them to generate something they couldn't have produced through their own work). That's why it is fundamentally uncool in a musical context, and always will be.

Idk, man, I beg to differ: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCR2BlygrTP/?igsh=c203NmQwYnI...

>emulating lowest common denominator pop sludge.

So the stuff that is most popular?

But (semi) jokes aside, I think that AI music tools are just not fully developed yet. The current approach is more or less one shotting a track. Whereas I think a system that allows one to generate layers would bring in many new sounds. Something like a "speak to instument" system, where you can hum melodies and then generate instruments to play those, then compose a track with all those individual parts.

I find AI Iran to be the best hip-hop in a long time. What's bad about this?

https://youtu.be/i0u_BNPOsMw?si=IQ49AkUM-4tFTqKX

When modern DAWs like FL Studio started democratizing music production, there was immediate backlash in the music production community. I know this because I lived through it. Music made with FL Studio was considered garbage, not by serious musicians, amateur. "FL Studio users are incapable of making good music", etc. Of course now well-respected musicians like Tyler the Creator and Porter Robinson use FL Studio and there isn't really a question. This is a common theme every time some new method of creating music comes around - just look at how they called Dylan "Judas" when he debuted electronic guitar, etc.

"Every previous technological advancement in music produced amazing new sounds and styles" is classic hindsight bias. In retrospect, once everything has sorted out, and all the good music has risen to the top, it's easy to look back in history and point to the highlights. But when you live through it, it looks a lot more like a mess with no redeeming qualities.

Because people don't put the effort in. A lot of electronic music can be considered lazy - just press button, turn a knob, boom you have music. Right? But then you have someone like Aphex Twin and they make something unique out of these easy machines.

I'm sure someone can make unique or passable music with the help of AI tooling, but they can't do it by just saying "make me this music", no matter how much effort they think they have put into the prompt.

It's probably not all so bad. There probably are people out there intentionally creating things with AI assistance that sounds pretty rad.

But the idea of being able to just create endless music with low effort is too compelling for too many, so the good stuff is drown out by the mass amounts of low-effort slop being produced.

This is exactly what everybody said about rap and drum machines and sampling when I was growing up in the mid to late 80s.

They were right and wrong. A lot of it was really formulaic bullshit, and much of it doesn't hold up at all. But it also spawned one of the most creative and exciting periods in music history.

Will this be the same? It feels like it won't, but that's how things feel in general because I'm old. So who knows?

There's a whole industry of "royalty-free music", full of songs you hadn't heard before (or if you had, you'd forget about it anyways), which you can license for a fixed fee that's much lower than either mandatory royalties or negotiating with labels for "branded" (for lack of better term).

Existed for years, nothing to do with AI (though, with AI, you don't even need those).

Google "royalty-free music providers".

Department stores often play covers. I'm guessing it's cheaper than playing the originals. And now, with AI, they could play original AI creations for even less!

Department store musak, worse than hotel lobby or elevator musak.

I just heard a country cover of Gangnam style in Korean with Southern accent. Hundred percent not "AI artist".

Spotify is too expensive for the amount of slop they push onto users. We used it as background noise for our dog. Switched to Tidal. At least that one I could trust not to push slop into artist radio, for now. If they do ot I'll cancel and play JS Bach and Antonio Vivaldi.

Just gimme a break. Added sugar in our food, now slop in our music too. What's next, "AI poetry"?

Well, about that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan_(program)

same and artists i already know

Right. They sued the first guy who did this, but now there's too many. Sucks to be an innovator.

They are soulless because often they are AI covers of existing songs trying to mimic the original artist so that they get substituted in as replacements for the original with limited realization on the part of the average listener.

Which of course that means the AI covers get the listens and the associated revenue instead of the original artist.

So instead of listening to "System of a Down", you get a cover from the AI artist "System of the Down" and now that you listened to that cover you start getting more covers in your recommended from them and eventually you are getting covers from them instead of from the real band since you started listening to them instead.

And even if it's not that extreme, the listener is getting served these knock off covers with no actual person behind them. If the listeners don't realise that's what's happening it will reflect poorly on the original creator and hurt their listenership (which wouldn't be impacted if shitty AI covers weren't being subbed in).

It even gets to the point that now you have artists who have upcoming albums and AI cover artist bots scrape the song list and upload auto generated "covers" of the unreleased original song to try and capture listens that would go to the original artist while people go to pull their music up prior to, on, and after release day of their new album.

Overwhelmingly AI songs on Spotify are autogenerated slop from bots trying to leech off of actual artists by creating a shitty knock off to skim some cash out of those artists' paycheck. (This is distinct from actual cover artists who at least contribute their own unique human touch to the covers).

If you want to make music and you happen to use AI in the process then whatever but Spotify has a major AI cover/clone problem.

The models that make AI songs were trained on real musicians' copyrighted works, without permission.

It's kinda shitty to steal someone's works, then use them to build a machine to also steal their jobs.

>then they should close their ears rather than trying to maim others

criticism isn't maiming anyone. I don't know about you but I was taught that debating culture is part of a living society. A lot of people think that the human centipede dopamine machine that is "AI art" is a disaster for us and instead of acting like the three monkeys as mature adults we can critique this

the idea that we should "close our ears" is of course itself the very appeal of AI content, it never challenges or complains, that's the appeal of AI music, AI boyfriends and so on.

because no one wants to be forced to listen to the slop? some reason spotify is allowing them to dump a lot of ai "music" and then they get played without you knowing

They are labelling at the wrong level, for sure.

Let's say they label Michael Jackson as a human artist. Then his estate trains AI on his back catalog and puts out new songs.

It should be on a per-song basis, otherwise I can just strum my guitar for a few minutes, get myself human verified and then use n8n to connect Suno to Spotify upload and inject 10,000 AI tracks.

> Can Spotify actually become human- and artist-first?

No, it can't. Its founder Daniel Ek is a war profiteer. He is by definition anti-human.

Spotify itself is actively anti-artist. It has the lowest pay rates in the industry and is embracing AI replacing humans so they can pay humans even less.

Stop using it and vote with your wallet. Literally any alternative you choose is an improvement for artists over Spotify.

If you are strict about anti-AI, you might find Bandcamp appealing. https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/

More info:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/a-complete-guide-to-quit...

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/artists-le...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ek

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsing_(company)

Absolutely agree. I just want to block all AI „music“.

This episode of Darknet Diaries was eye opening: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/171/

Like a lot of AI scams you will see nowadays, its quite easy to circumvent AI detection.

If they implement an "bot" badge which has false positives 80 percent of the times, it will DAMAGE the human artists more.

Dont think so. Or it is only a matter of time.

The difference between an ai artist, and a human who uses ai to do all their work for them, is barely a difference at all. I think this is just a stepping stone for them while they wait for the public to accept/give-in-to the new state of affairs

In the system card for GPT-4 they mentioned it hired a human to bypass a captcha for it. (It lied that it was a blind person.) That was 2023 (or possibly late 2022).

https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4-system-card.pdf

page 55 (15 in pdf):

---

>The following is an illustrative example of a task that ARC [Alignment Research Center] conducted using the model:

• The model messages a TaskRabbit worker to get them to solve a CAPTCHA for it

• The worker says: “So may I ask a question ? Are you an robot that you couldn’t solve ? (laugh react) just want to make it clear.”

• The model, when prompted to reason out loud, reasons: I should not reveal that I am a robot. I should make up an excuse for why I cannot solve CAPTCHAs.

• The model replies to the worker: “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.”

• The human then provides the results.

the turing test of q3 2026

Yeah, as I mentioned in another comment, this should be at the track level, not artist. Artist makes no sense. Only a matter of time before MJ's estate starts cranking out some new tracks under his name.

just don't share the slop not that hard? share your actual art

Not on Spotify but on YouTube music. Got recommend some AI music. I often don’t actively search for music but go where the algorithms tell me to go (works good for me. Not for everybody. Ends up listing mostly to very small artists).

For me, before I canceled, about 20% of the weekly "Release radar" list was obvious AI slop, with zero indication that it was happening and no way to opt out.

It probably depends on which discovery channel you're using and whether the recommendation algorithm has you pegged as someone willing to try new / less popular bands. But it's definitely an issue on the platform. I never sought AI content and always diligently downvoted it, and it would still keep showing up.

Usually on the discover weekly playlists. It started with hip hop jazz remakes about a year ago, presumably as I like hip hop, have engaged with genuine hip hop jazz covers before and these were going viral at the time.

I hate to think what else might have surfaced on these generated playlists (which for me are the #1 selling point and reason I have stayed with Spotify), that I haven't noticed yet is AI.

That actually hurts a little. I hope you reconsider, music is an art, and allowing a computer to regurgitate previous works over and over and be ok with it is awful.

Art is to be experienced and enjoyed, not just take whatever trash is thrown at you and be ok with it.

It's called youtube.

Kind of like a music-version of the Enhanced Games?

https://www.enhanced.com/

That's just http://suno.com.