Spotify Says It Hid 50 Million Slop Tracks, and I Do Not Trust the Number

I do not trust Spotify’s 50 million figure, but I have certainly run into a lot of AI-generated music lately.

In a post published on October 20, Spotify said it has taken more than 50 million “slop and spam” tracks out of its recommendations so far this year. That is not the same as removing them. Spotify has only said the tracks no longer get recommended or added to its editorial playlists, and it has not said how many of the 50 million were made with AI and how many are other kinds of spam. The other number it keeps citing, more than 75 million spammy tracks removed from the platform entirely, was first published in September 2025 and has not been updated since.

The rest of the post is about labels. Artists can disclose how they used AI through AI Credits, launched in April, and Spotify says it receives tens of thousands of them every day. Listeners can only see them in the song credits of the Now Playing view on mobile. Thousands of virtual artists now carry an “AI Persona” label and are left out of recommendations by default unless you follow them. There is no setting to hide AI music altogether. Deezer has said it plans to offer one by the end of the year.

The worst part, in my experience, is that most artists do not say their music is AI-generated, and Spotify’s system depends on them saying so. Disclosure is voluntary.

I work with AI. I generate images and sometimes voices, so my recommendations lean that way too. Some of that music I like. But not everyone makes it with a minimum level of quality, and many simply put something together to release and try to scrape a few cents. The numbers point the same way. Spotify says tracks with a high probability of being AI-generated are 10 times more likely to fall below its 1,000-stream royalty threshold. Deezer says fully AI-generated tracks passed half of its daily uploads in June, around 90,000 a day, while making up only 1 to 3% of streams, and that up to 85% of the streams on those tracks in 2025 were fraudulent.

Spotify has not published how the 50 million tracks split between AI music and other spam.