> 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?

[flagged]