Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Spotify, newest first.
Spotify said it removed more than 50 million songs it judged to be AI-generated slop or spam from recommendations over the past year, and changed its recommendation system to favor music made by people. It flags tracks using listener feedback, upload patterns, metadata and outside AI-detection tools, and says complaints about such music have fallen since. The figure follows the AI Persona badge Spotify announced in August for artists who are not real people; it still stops short of labeling every AI-made track, as YouTube Music now does.
Michael Smith of North Carolina was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit more than $8 million, after pleading guilty to the first US criminal case of AI-assisted streaming fraud. Over seven years he made hundreds of thousands of AI songs and ran thousands of fake accounts on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music to stream them. In one month of 2023 his tracks drew 80.9 million streams, against 9.3 million for Taylor Swift's whole catalog. Prosecutors say the payouts came out of the royalty pool shared with real artists.
Artists can now self-declare as an "AI Persona" in Spotify for Artists, and from mid-September the badge starts appearing on profiles, in search and on playlist track rows. Spotify will also apply a "Likely AI Persona" label itself, using a mix of human and automated review of profiles whose name and imagery appear to be photorealistic AI-generated identities. Those artists are excluded by default from editorial and algorithmic recommendations unless a listener follows them. Spotify stresses the badge is about the artist's public identity, not about how the music was made.
Merlin, which represents independent labels and distributors across more than 70 countries and roughly 15 percent of the global recorded-music market, signed on to Spotify's forthcoming fan-made covers and remixing product. Member labels choose whether their artists take part, and the tool will launch as a paid add-on so participating artists earn from it. "Every creation drives listeners back to the original work," said Spotify senior vice president Charlie Hellman. Universal Music Group had already backed the product separately, which puts both the major-label and independent halves of the market inside a format that did not exist a year ago.
Spotify and Universal Music Group announced a licensing deal Thursday that will let Premium subscribers create AI-generated covers and remixes of Universal artists' songs, with revenue shared back to participating artists. The deal is built on three principles — **"consent, credit, and compensation,"** per Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström — and is the music industry's most prominent AI-licensing framework to date, contrasting sharply with Suno and Udio, which are being sued by the major labels for training on their catalogs without permission. Neither launch date nor the list of participating artists has been announced.
Spotify Labs unveiled Studio, a desktop app whose AI agent browses the web and reads users' calendar, inbox, and notes to generate personalized podcasts, briefings, and playlists — explicitly framed as a competitor to Google's NotebookLM. The same Investor Day also rolled out an AI Q&A feature for Premium podcast listeners in the US, Sweden, and Ireland and a prompt-driven Personal Podcasts generator. Separately, Spotify for Authors will open an ElevenLabs-powered audiobook narration tool in invite-only beta next month, letting self-publishing authors generate audiobooks they can distribute on any platform.