7 ms·

Spotify is full of AI music

149 points by segasaturn 2y ago

idunnoman1222 2y ago
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
ajdude 2y ago
I've been listening to the radio a lot more recently; there's a few channels, such as my local university's non profit/commercial free radio station that often play some pretty obscure and interesting things, I've discovered a lot of new music that I otherwise never would have listened to.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline. 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't get a cent from it. Perhaps legal, but not in the spirit of fairness.
- stackghost 2y ago
  >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't get a cent from it. Much like visual artists, graphic designers, and soon authors.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    Exactly right. Pretty much everyone who has had faith in the system that there is at least some fairness in content creation.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Except not really. I'm still going to keep consuming art made by humans, even subconsciously, and I'm going to keep enjoying it. AI has no ground-truth for enjoyable content if not the successful works humans have made and tested already. Perhaps the quantity advantage has turned in favor of robots, but I'll be damned if you can name one AI-generated pop song that everyone knows by heart. And truth be told - musicians are an excellent example of how a hostile industry can fuck over the working man long before AI enters the equation. Established musicians needed to be managed, and that management typically came from a label that would sign you if you weren't rich enough to go indie. Then, you're effectively contracted talent that has little to no ownership of your own life work. You are expected to provide all of the emotional gravitas while retaining none of the artistic control, and it only got worse in a digital era that further highlighted how valueless physical music had become. Artists had to make their money off tours and merch sales while simultaneously honoring arbitrary record deals demanding X amount of music over Y period of time.
    - visarga 2y ago
      > AI has no ground truth for enjoyable content if not the successful works humans have made and tested already. Yes it does, your own AI generated pieces are based in your prompt, not purely generated by AI. So they are meaningful to you, but still worthless to others. They can generate their own AI shit. What I mean is that AI content is useful if you had a hand shaping it.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        My prompt is meaningless. When I tell AI to proofread my writing or to generate a boilerplate email, pretty much no part of my prompt makes it into the final product. It's a seed of entropy that gets a literary flywheel spinning, but I'm not so pretentious as to assume my 3-word query is somehow unique or even influences the tone of the output. It's not "my" response just because I gave it a question. Pretty much the past 5 years of model finetuning has been predicated on the idea that AI cannot reliably steer itself in the right direction. Models perform better in almost every way when you seed them with additional, non-unique and human-generated training data.
  - blibble 2y ago
    don't forget software developers I only ever required attribution didn't stop OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Amazon shitting all over even that minimal condition parasites
- enasterosophes 2y ago
  > Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline. Or FLACs, if you can get them, which you can on bandcamp. I've got a terabyte of music in my offline playlist. It takes a few months to cycle through everything, then top it up with any new discoveries and latest releases before the next cycle starts.
  - namaria 2y ago
    Lossless local files is the way to go. Full control. Maybe I'm a bit controlling, but if I am paying for music I want the optimal experience and full control.
- schwartzworld 2y ago
  Or even better, go to live shows.
- cageface 2y ago
  I agree. In fact I built my own music player to support this on Mac because I wasn't happy with the existing apps: https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon
asabla 2y ago
Before articles about this started to show up on the web, I'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). 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've never heard of, and were hard to find further information on. Hopefully Spotify won't touch weekly release playlist (the one which refreshes every friday) of artists you already listen to and have saved into personal playlists.
adsteel_ 2y ago
Not just AI music, but "ghost artists", which are real people paid bottom dollar to create generic playlist music in a theme, under a different name. https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/music-streaming/spotify-accused-of-pushing-ghost-artists-into-our-playlists-heres-whats-going-on https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/music-streaming/spot...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ipaddr 2y ago
  Ghost artists? Aren't they called a studio artist which makes up the majority of paid works produced. Selling art and the copyright happens in every area. Most visual art produced for money doesn't have an artists name attached either.
- emmelaich 2y ago
  I went to an upmarket oceanside resort last year. The entire music playlist was 12 minute remixes (possibly AI) of repetitive upbeat ambient. It was sending the staff crazy to listen to it all day.
throwaway91135 2y ago
The logical conclusion is to also write AI viewers and listeners. But on YouTube that would be called click fraud. Seems like the whole online industry is eliminating itself and cheering all the way down.
- ainiriand 2y ago
  Technology Ouroboros.
- snickerbockers 2y ago
  Also known as the dead Internet theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory When I first heard about it on /x/ about 6 years ago I thought it was a bit of a morbid joke around how if all your human interaction is online you can't definitively state that the universe exists outside your front door. But recently it's started to look like more of a true statement that, at least as far as the internet goes, it will soon be impossible to know if anybody you interact with actually exists. FWIW I'm actually looking forward to this happening, for every social activity that is often claimed to have been better before the internet (ie dating, casual debates about politics, etc) has a potential to return to its pre-internet status quo as people come to the conclusion that none of it is real and gradually drop out. Internet will still exist as a valuable tool for transmitting data but the concept of online communities and social networks will suffer and degrade until there's nothing but spam like usenet did.
  - Uehreka 2y ago
    I dunno, I’ve never seen any of these sort of “things will get better by getting worse” theories pan out. I’d wager that if it becomes difficult to tell real from fake on the internet, people may just become more atomized and paranoid, retreating away from social interaction altogether. So for that reason I hope the Dead Internet Theory doesn’t come to pass.
  - p2detar 2y ago
    While I appreciate the claims about GPT and Google search-bots-first designed web, I couldn’t agree less with the „coordinated international effort“ part. I much prefer Maggie Appleton‘s Dark Forest writing and talk on the matter: > The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk. > It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators. Links: - https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest - Talk: https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M edit: formatting
linotype 2y ago
It’s awful. They absolutely need to introduce a toggle to turn it off.
- emptiestplace 2y ago
  It’s going to take a lot more backlash than this—they have too much financial incentive to push royalty-free tracks.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    Just like their “Shuffle” feature. They have an incentive to play songs in your list that are financially beneficial to them.
    - scotty79 2y ago
      It's just like the radio.
      - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
        Except the radio they are upfront that you are only a listener. Spotify says you can make a collection as the all powerful curator, and hear from it in what has been understood to be a random selection. They’re breaking the definition of shuffle.
- bufferoverflow 2y ago
  And how do you tell if some music is AI or not? Sure, there are some obvious cases. But I have been collecting AI songs that I like, and I can't tell the difference from human-made music.
wenbin 2y ago
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. However, AI-generated fake podcasts are a different story—they're often frustrating and a waste of people's time. Unfortunately, platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify are increasingly populated with these spammy, AI-created podcasts. For those interested, here's a small subset (4,000+) of such AI-generated fake podcasts available on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts-spams https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak....
- vunderba 2y ago
  Given how overzealous Youtube can be around copyright strikes, I also wouldn't be surprised if AI became the de-facto standard for background music on YT vids. To your point, I actually used to run CPU Bach (a 3DO game that tried to procedurally generate contrapuntal classical music) as a good background music generator while studying as a kid. Very few people remember it or the 3DO for that matter but it was quite impressive for its time! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.P.U._Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.P.U._Bach https://youtu.be/cW7c43N3pr4?t=123 https://youtu.be/cW7c43N3pr4?t=123
  - jsheard 2y ago
    > Given how overzealous Youtube can be around copyright strikes, I also wouldn't be surprised if AI became the de-facto standard for background music on YT vids. The latest grift is posting AI "covers" of real songs to farm SEO hits while evading copyright strikes, which results in fever dreams like this: https://x.com/Karbonicc/status/1864360384884310481 https://x.com/Karbonicc/status/1864360384884310481
- callc 2y ago
  Not to me. I’d rather have human created music, even when it is background music and I’m doing a primary activity that needs focus. In other contexts, where the stakes are even lower, such as elevator music or on-hold call music AI gen music will probably have less people sneer at it.
sollewitt 2y ago
I noticed this and the ghost artists in my recommendations after playing some ambient. I'm done with Spotify. I'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. I love music, I'm an amateur musician and I respect artists. This treats music as a fungible commodity. That's not what music is to me, so I choose not to support that. 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 in advance to stream their catalogue one time to learn from. 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.
- echelon 2y ago
  > This treats music as a fungible commodity. This is only going to accelerate. Until the labels die, the universe will find every way to route around them. Hopefully concert venues are next.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    How are musicians are going to perform live before large audiences?
    - echelon 2y ago
      I'm referring to the Ticketmaster / Live Nation monopoly. If you're not familiar, the company has a corner on the market for concert venues and all associated services (booking, ticket resale, food and liquor vendors, point of sale, etc.) They use this to inflate ticket prices.
      - CyberDildonics 2y ago
        How is shoveling AI generated songs going to take down ticket master?
- mvdtnz 2y ago
forrestthewoods 2y ago
This article is trash. Here’s the original reporting expose you want to read: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin... Money quote: > 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.
- awfulneutral 2y ago
  Isn't that a different phenomenon? This article is about hit songs that have cheap AI covers, almost identical sounding, presumably to poach royalties from the real musicians. The "ghost" thing is interesting too, that sounds almost like the industry from before The Beatles, when bands were just people hired by the record companies to record songs written by others, and the companies owned pretty much everything.
  - forrestthewoods 2y ago
    There is zero evidence in the article to support the claim of AI artist. It’s far far more likely the “AI Artists” are actually Spotify funded ghost artists. The best evidence for “AI artist” is just as supportive of “Spotify ghost artists” as it is AI.
    - awfulneutral 2y ago
      I listened to a few of the songs and I could definitely believe they are AI. They are extremely clean, near-identical covers, like karaoke versions I guess. If Spotify is funding these, that means they would be trying to poach money directly from the biggest artists/companies. That seems like a much bigger controversy than creating generic background music and spreading that around their algorithms.
clvx 2y ago
Spotify's app is bloated. I've been premium since 2014 but I'm reaching my limit of all the garbage the app has. I wish I could deactivate all podcasts and audiobooks. I don't care about it. I don'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'm just self padding myself.
- nytesky 2y ago
  It’s interesting that Apple split out music from iTunes, and has somewhat walled apps for music, podcasts, audiobooks while Spotify consolidated
  - colecut 2y ago
    Apple owns the operating system, so they can keep their full collection of apps front and center without even a download
  - 015a 2y ago
    Spotify would probably argue that Apple has control of the OS, so they can surface all of their apps, pre-install them, whereas Spotify has more pressure to leverage their existing install base by bundling everything into one. I would bet every dollar of my net worth that they are critically wrong on this; its such a beautiful little package that some VP can sell a higher-up to explain away why something they're responsible for isn't performing as expected. I've heard dozens of people complain about how crowded the Spotify app is becoming. I don't know anyone who actively and regularly uses Spotify as a podcast platform; when Joe Rogan was exclusive to Spotify for a bit, I heard a couple people complain about that, which means they were (begrudgingly) using it; but that isn't the situation anymore. How these complaints convert into behavior changes, subscription cancellations, etc; I don't know.
- chairmansteve 2y ago
  I'm very happy with YouTube Music. I pay the subscription.
- 2y ago
bigfatkitten 2y ago
Spotify is at the wrong end of the enshittification cycle. I'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.
footy 2y ago
I'm surprised by how big this news story has been the past week or so, because I thought we all knew about Spotify's fake music already. I remember reading about this program at least 6 years ago. I haven't used Spotify since.
- spinach 2y ago
  It sounds like you mean the ghost music, which several people have referenced already in this comment section. That is made by real people while in the linked article they are talking about AI generated music.
dudeinjapan 2y ago
I like my music to be created the old fashioned way: using general MIDI on a Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card.
meindnoch 2y ago
People who care about music listen to specific artists the know, not some AI-slop auto-generated playlist.
- sojournerc 2y ago
  Yes, but... I used to discover great new (to me) artists on Spotify. Now I'm pigeon holed by "the algorithm", to the point where when I start a new playlist based on an artist or song it's 90% songs already in my liked list. The recommendations used to feel like magic, now it's very limited in what it considered similar to something I'm listening to, like it fixates on one attribute of a song, but not the broader context or genre.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    yes the add to playlist feature kinda sucks nowadays but i find the 'discover weekly' still relatively strong if not even improving
    - BalinKing 2y ago
      Personally, Discover Weekly went super downhill for me about a year ago. I used to get about one really good song a week, which I was really impressed by. But now, it's a deluge of songs with obviously fake instruments (the strings are a giveaway) and (presumably) AI-generated album covers. And the weird part is that sometimes a real, big name artist will be co-credited, but I highly doubt they had anything to do with it. (I've specifically noticed this with Audiomachine in particular, for some reason.) I don't know if this phenomenon is related to the main article, but I've been wanting to rant about it for a while :-P
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related more recently: Ghost artists on Spotify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530
bpbp-mango 2y ago
I'm not sure if they're AI but most playlists start strong with real artists but quickly devolve into ... generic slop. Going to give Apple Music a try.
- crorella 2y ago
  I like Qobuz, have you tried it ?
  - bpbp-mango 2y ago
    Looks ok, will give it shot too. What do you like about it?
    - crorella 2y ago
      the sound quality
1659447091 2y ago
I still prefer radio (SiriusXM cause I don't like commercials) it has the right mix of new, "b-tracks", 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'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.
101008 2y ago
I feel like a lot of companies / 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 "more ethical" alternative.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
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?
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Songshift works, sort of.
015a 2y ago
At the end of the day, Spotify's north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed; and to get that metric as low as possible. That's why they push podcasts so hard (and why they aren't in a separate app); Premium subscribers barely noticed when they still get ads in podcasts, beautiful double-dipping Spotify! It's why they want to get big into audiobooks; they're going to be a keystone in their justification for an even higher $20+/mo subscription. Netflix was well on the same course; but instead made what was absolutely not 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'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't have the same escape hatch Netflix had; but they're tearing their app and users apart trying to find one.
- occz 2y ago
  >At the end of the day, Spotify's north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed Where did you get this from? All available answers when searching seem to point out "Time Spent Listening" being the north-star metric for Spotify, not whatever you said. Did you just make this up?
tkgally 2y ago
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: “Nirvana Tribute ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Girl Group 1960’s Tribute” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwSeVM1g9hs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwSeVM1g9hs At first I thought it was a real singer, but then I remembered how convincing the lastest text-to-music services are becoming. “Stairway to Heaven” in a similar style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dldL3tTtr-8&t=605s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dldL3tTtr-8&t=605s
- scotty79 2y ago
  My favorite song of 2024 is AI generated bit about a specific video game. There's no way in hell this song would ever get created without AI.
downsplat 2y ago
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's phone. It's been working wonders for almost 10 years.
- _ink_ 2y ago
  I had this and it's great. But I love Spotify for showing me similar music or music that I might like. I found so many awesome artists through it.
fuzzy_biscuit 2y ago
I use Spotify to listen to Louis Cole and his contemporaries only at this point. And children's music for my son. Spotify was lovely in 2014-2015 when it made it truly was to discover new musicians. Now it's barf. Once my son is more grown, I'll be done with it.
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
Not having actually random shuffle is more important to me, but I’m only 50/50 on Spotify right now despite being a premium member for a decade. One wrong move, and one export/import to another service and I’m gone.
thelucent 2y ago
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. 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. 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. For example, this album that tells about the phases of life as seasons is AI generated. https://youtu.be/RlCY67Nbubk?si=2HQEyH5MiAnGeW4r https://youtu.be/RlCY67Nbubk?si=2HQEyH5MiAnGeW4r
idomajid 2y ago
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. Listening to retro music makes more sense to me these days. Disclaimer: I’m not a musician.

149 points by segasaturn 2y ago

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

ajdude 2y ago

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

vouaobrasil 2y ago

Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline. 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't get a cent from it. Perhaps legal, but not in the spirit of fairness.

stackghost 2y ago
>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't get a cent from it. Much like visual artists, graphic designers, and soon authors.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Exactly right. Pretty much everyone who has had faith in the system that there is at least some fairness in content creation.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Except not really. I'm still going to keep consuming art made by humans, even subconsciously, and I'm going to keep enjoying it. AI has no ground-truth for enjoyable content if not the successful works humans have made and tested already. Perhaps the quantity advantage has turned in favor of robots, but I'll be damned if you can name one AI-generated pop song that everyone knows by heart. And truth be told - musicians are an excellent example of how a hostile industry can fuck over the working man long before AI enters the equation. Established musicians needed to be managed, and that management typically came from a label that would sign you if you weren't rich enough to go indie. Then, you're effectively contracted talent that has little to no ownership of your own life work. You are expected to provide all of the emotional gravitas while retaining none of the artistic control, and it only got worse in a digital era that further highlighted how valueless physical music had become. Artists had to make their money off tours and merch sales while simultaneously honoring arbitrary record deals demanding X amount of music over Y period of time.
  - visarga 2y ago
    > AI has no ground truth for enjoyable content if not the successful works humans have made and tested already. Yes it does, your own AI generated pieces are based in your prompt, not purely generated by AI. So they are meaningful to you, but still worthless to others. They can generate their own AI shit. What I mean is that AI content is useful if you had a hand shaping it.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      My prompt is meaningless. When I tell AI to proofread my writing or to generate a boilerplate email, pretty much no part of my prompt makes it into the final product. It's a seed of entropy that gets a literary flywheel spinning, but I'm not so pretentious as to assume my 3-word query is somehow unique or even influences the tone of the output. It's not "my" response just because I gave it a question. Pretty much the past 5 years of model finetuning has been predicated on the idea that AI cannot reliably steer itself in the right direction. Models perform better in almost every way when you seed them with additional, non-unique and human-generated training data.
- blibble 2y ago
  don't forget software developers I only ever required attribution didn't stop OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Amazon shitting all over even that minimal condition parasites
enasterosophes 2y ago
> Yet another reason to buy MP3s from known bands and musicians and just listen to it offline. Or FLACs, if you can get them, which you can on bandcamp. I've got a terabyte of music in my offline playlist. It takes a few months to cycle through everything, then top it up with any new discoveries and latest releases before the next cycle starts.
- namaria 2y ago
  Lossless local files is the way to go. Full control. Maybe I'm a bit controlling, but if I am paying for music I want the optimal experience and full control.
schwartzworld 2y ago
Or even better, go to live shows.
cageface 2y ago
I agree. In fact I built my own music player to support this on Mac because I wasn't happy with the existing apps: https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon

asabla 2y ago

Before articles about this started to show up on the web, I'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). 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've never heard of, and were hard to find further information on. Hopefully Spotify won't touch weekly release playlist (the one which refreshes every friday) of artists you already listen to and have saved into personal playlists.

adsteel_ 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ipaddr 2y ago
Ghost artists? Aren't they called a studio artist which makes up the majority of paid works produced. Selling art and the copyright happens in every area. Most visual art produced for money doesn't have an artists name attached either.
emmelaich 2y ago
I went to an upmarket oceanside resort last year. The entire music playlist was 12 minute remixes (possibly AI) of repetitive upbeat ambient. It was sending the staff crazy to listen to it all day.

throwaway91135 2y ago

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

ainiriand 2y ago
Technology Ouroboros.
snickerbockers 2y ago
Also known as the dead Internet theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory When I first heard about it on /x/ about 6 years ago I thought it was a bit of a morbid joke around how if all your human interaction is online you can't definitively state that the universe exists outside your front door. But recently it's started to look like more of a true statement that, at least as far as the internet goes, it will soon be impossible to know if anybody you interact with actually exists. FWIW I'm actually looking forward to this happening, for every social activity that is often claimed to have been better before the internet (ie dating, casual debates about politics, etc) has a potential to return to its pre-internet status quo as people come to the conclusion that none of it is real and gradually drop out. Internet will still exist as a valuable tool for transmitting data but the concept of online communities and social networks will suffer and degrade until there's nothing but spam like usenet did.
- Uehreka 2y ago
  I dunno, I’ve never seen any of these sort of “things will get better by getting worse” theories pan out. I’d wager that if it becomes difficult to tell real from fake on the internet, people may just become more atomized and paranoid, retreating away from social interaction altogether. So for that reason I hope the Dead Internet Theory doesn’t come to pass.
- p2detar 2y ago
  While I appreciate the claims about GPT and Google search-bots-first designed web, I couldn’t agree less with the „coordinated international effort“ part. I much prefer Maggie Appleton‘s Dark Forest writing and talk on the matter: > The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk. > It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators. Links: - https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest - Talk: https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M https://youtu.be/QPoM-h1fK8M edit: formatting

linotype 2y ago

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

emptiestplace 2y ago
It’s going to take a lot more backlash than this—they have too much financial incentive to push royalty-free tracks.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  Just like their “Shuffle” feature. They have an incentive to play songs in your list that are financially beneficial to them.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    It's just like the radio.
    - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
      Except the radio they are upfront that you are only a listener. Spotify says you can make a collection as the all powerful curator, and hear from it in what has been understood to be a random selection. They’re breaking the definition of shuffle.
bufferoverflow 2y ago
And how do you tell if some music is AI or not? Sure, there are some obvious cases. But I have been collecting AI songs that I like, and I can't tell the difference from human-made music.

wenbin 2y ago

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. However, AI-generated fake podcasts are a different story—they're often frustrating and a waste of people's time. Unfortunately, platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify are increasingly populated with these spammy, AI-created podcasts. For those interested, here's a small subset (4,000+) of such AI-generated fake podcasts available on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts-spams https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak....

vunderba 2y ago
Given how overzealous Youtube can be around copyright strikes, I also wouldn't be surprised if AI became the de-facto standard for background music on YT vids. To your point, I actually used to run CPU Bach (a 3DO game that tried to procedurally generate contrapuntal classical music) as a good background music generator while studying as a kid. Very few people remember it or the 3DO for that matter but it was quite impressive for its time! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.P.U._Bach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.P.U._Bach https://youtu.be/cW7c43N3pr4?t=123 https://youtu.be/cW7c43N3pr4?t=123
- jsheard 2y ago
  > Given how overzealous Youtube can be around copyright strikes, I also wouldn't be surprised if AI became the de-facto standard for background music on YT vids. The latest grift is posting AI "covers" of real songs to farm SEO hits while evading copyright strikes, which results in fever dreams like this: https://x.com/Karbonicc/status/1864360384884310481 https://x.com/Karbonicc/status/1864360384884310481
callc 2y ago
Not to me. I’d rather have human created music, even when it is background music and I’m doing a primary activity that needs focus. In other contexts, where the stakes are even lower, such as elevator music or on-hold call music AI gen music will probably have less people sneer at it.

sollewitt 2y ago

I noticed this and the ghost artists in my recommendations after playing some ambient. I'm done with Spotify. I'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. I love music, I'm an amateur musician and I respect artists. This treats music as a fungible commodity. That's not what music is to me, so I choose not to support that. 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 in advance to stream their catalogue one time to learn from. 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.

echelon 2y ago
> This treats music as a fungible commodity. This is only going to accelerate. Until the labels die, the universe will find every way to route around them. Hopefully concert venues are next.
- nine_k 2y ago
  How are musicians are going to perform live before large audiences?
  - echelon 2y ago
    I'm referring to the Ticketmaster / Live Nation monopoly. If you're not familiar, the company has a corner on the market for concert venues and all associated services (booking, ticket resale, food and liquor vendors, point of sale, etc.) They use this to inflate ticket prices.
    - CyberDildonics 2y ago
      How is shoveling AI generated songs going to take down ticket master?
mvdtnz 2y ago

forrestthewoods 2y ago

This article is trash. Here’s the original reporting expose you want to read: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin... Money quote: > 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.

awfulneutral 2y ago
Isn't that a different phenomenon? This article is about hit songs that have cheap AI covers, almost identical sounding, presumably to poach royalties from the real musicians. The "ghost" thing is interesting too, that sounds almost like the industry from before The Beatles, when bands were just people hired by the record companies to record songs written by others, and the companies owned pretty much everything.
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  There is zero evidence in the article to support the claim of AI artist. It’s far far more likely the “AI Artists” are actually Spotify funded ghost artists. The best evidence for “AI artist” is just as supportive of “Spotify ghost artists” as it is AI.
  - awfulneutral 2y ago
    I listened to a few of the songs and I could definitely believe they are AI. They are extremely clean, near-identical covers, like karaoke versions I guess. If Spotify is funding these, that means they would be trying to poach money directly from the biggest artists/companies. That seems like a much bigger controversy than creating generic background music and spreading that around their algorithms.

clvx 2y ago

Spotify's app is bloated. I've been premium since 2014 but I'm reaching my limit of all the garbage the app has. I wish I could deactivate all podcasts and audiobooks. I don't care about it. I don'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'm just self padding myself.

nytesky 2y ago
It’s interesting that Apple split out music from iTunes, and has somewhat walled apps for music, podcasts, audiobooks while Spotify consolidated
- colecut 2y ago
  Apple owns the operating system, so they can keep their full collection of apps front and center without even a download
- 015a 2y ago
  Spotify would probably argue that Apple has control of the OS, so they can surface all of their apps, pre-install them, whereas Spotify has more pressure to leverage their existing install base by bundling everything into one. I would bet every dollar of my net worth that they are critically wrong on this; its such a beautiful little package that some VP can sell a higher-up to explain away why something they're responsible for isn't performing as expected. I've heard dozens of people complain about how crowded the Spotify app is becoming. I don't know anyone who actively and regularly uses Spotify as a podcast platform; when Joe Rogan was exclusive to Spotify for a bit, I heard a couple people complain about that, which means they were (begrudgingly) using it; but that isn't the situation anymore. How these complaints convert into behavior changes, subscription cancellations, etc; I don't know.
chairmansteve 2y ago
I'm very happy with YouTube Music. I pay the subscription.
2y ago

bigfatkitten 2y ago

Spotify is at the wrong end of the enshittification cycle. I'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.

footy 2y ago

I'm surprised by how big this news story has been the past week or so, because I thought we all knew about Spotify's fake music already. I remember reading about this program at least 6 years ago. I haven't used Spotify since.

spinach 2y ago
It sounds like you mean the ghost music, which several people have referenced already in this comment section. That is made by real people while in the linked article they are talking about AI generated music.

dudeinjapan 2y ago

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

meindnoch 2y ago

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

sojournerc 2y ago
Yes, but... I used to discover great new (to me) artists on Spotify. Now I'm pigeon holed by "the algorithm", to the point where when I start a new playlist based on an artist or song it's 90% songs already in my liked list. The recommendations used to feel like magic, now it's very limited in what it considered similar to something I'm listening to, like it fixates on one attribute of a song, but not the broader context or genre.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  yes the add to playlist feature kinda sucks nowadays but i find the 'discover weekly' still relatively strong if not even improving
  - BalinKing 2y ago
    Personally, Discover Weekly went super downhill for me about a year ago. I used to get about one really good song a week, which I was really impressed by. But now, it's a deluge of songs with obviously fake instruments (the strings are a giveaway) and (presumably) AI-generated album covers. And the weird part is that sometimes a real, big name artist will be co-credited, but I highly doubt they had anything to do with it. (I've specifically noticed this with Audiomachine in particular, for some reason.) I don't know if this phenomenon is related to the main article, but I've been wanting to rant about it for a while :-P

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related more recently: Ghost artists on Spotify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530

bpbp-mango 2y ago

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

crorella 2y ago
I like Qobuz, have you tried it ?
- bpbp-mango 2y ago
  Looks ok, will give it shot too. What do you like about it?
  - crorella 2y ago
    the sound quality

1659447091 2y ago

I still prefer radio (SiriusXM cause I don't like commercials) it has the right mix of new, "b-tracks", 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'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.

101008 2y ago

I feel like a lot of companies / 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 "more ethical" alternative.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

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?

CamperBob2 2y ago
Songshift works, sort of.

015a 2y ago

At the end of the day, Spotify's north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed; and to get that metric as low as possible. That's why they push podcasts so hard (and why they aren't in a separate app); Premium subscribers barely noticed when they still get ads in podcasts, beautiful double-dipping Spotify! It's why they want to get big into audiobooks; they're going to be a keystone in their justification for an even higher $20+/mo subscription. Netflix was well on the same course; but instead made what was absolutely not 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'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't have the same escape hatch Netflix had; but they're tearing their app and users apart trying to find one.

occz 2y ago
>At the end of the day, Spotify's north-star metric is average dollars of cost per minute of audio consumed Where did you get this from? All available answers when searching seem to point out "Time Spent Listening" being the north-star metric for Spotify, not whatever you said. Did you just make this up?

tkgally 2y ago

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: “Nirvana Tribute ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Girl Group 1960’s Tribute” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwSeVM1g9hs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwSeVM1g9hs At first I thought it was a real singer, but then I remembered how convincing the lastest text-to-music services are becoming. “Stairway to Heaven” in a similar style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dldL3tTtr-8&t=605s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dldL3tTtr-8&t=605s

scotty79 2y ago
My favorite song of 2024 is AI generated bit about a specific video game. There's no way in hell this song would ever get created without AI.

downsplat 2y ago

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's phone. It's been working wonders for almost 10 years.

_ink_ 2y ago
I had this and it's great. But I love Spotify for showing me similar music or music that I might like. I found so many awesome artists through it.

fuzzy_biscuit 2y ago

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

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

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

thelucent 2y ago

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. 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. 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. For example, this album that tells about the phases of life as seasons is AI generated. https://youtu.be/RlCY67Nbubk?si=2HQEyH5MiAnGeW4r https://youtu.be/RlCY67Nbubk?si=2HQEyH5MiAnGeW4r

idomajid 2y ago

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. Listening to retro music makes more sense to me these days. Disclaimer: I’m not a musician.