Spotify has cut more than 50 million AI slop and spam tracks out of its recommendations this year, the company said Tuesday, leaving the songs on the service but out of reach of the algorithm that decides what plays next.
The 75 million tracks it deleted outright for serious or repeated violations are a separate count, first shared in September 2025.
On peak days in June, more than half of what got uploaded to Deezer was fully AI-generated. Those tracks pulled just 1% to 3% of the platform’s streams, and as much as 85% of their 2025 plays were flagged as fraudulent. Much of that listening isn’t human. Uploaders generate songs by the hundreds or thousands and loop them with bot plays to collect royalties, and on Spotify each one needs 1,000 streams a year before it earns a cent, under a threshold set in 2024.
The tracks people skipped, ignored or flagged as unwanted turned out to be consistently slop or spam, which made listeners Spotify’s first line of detection for mass uploads, duplicates, SEO-stuffed titles, spammy playlist networks and artificially short songs.
“Using these signals together, we can identify likely slop or spam with more confidence,” Spotify wrote, describing a system that layers that listener behavior on top of upload patterns, metadata and third-party AI detection tools.
Complaints about recommendations have dropped since the changes began about six months ago, though Spotify gave no number. It also didn’t say what share of its uploads are AI-generated, whether the 50 million and 75 million figures overlap or which detection tools it uses. When Digital Music News asked for a fresh takedown count, the company repeated the recommendations figure.
AI-generated acts on Spotify now carry an AI Persona badge, Artist Profile Protection is in beta, and the company is building an AI remix and cover tool of its own.
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Tidal took a harder line this summer by refusing to pay out on fully AI-generated tracks, while Deezer tags AI audio and plans to let listeners switch it off. And Spotify’s more than 300,000 verified human artists still account for over 99% of what people search for on the app.
