Spotify’s Discover Weekly Lists Hit with a Deluge of AI Slop

Photo Credit: David Pupăză

Spotify recently promised to address the issue of AI inundating the platform, but slop continues to find its way into users’ Discover Weekly lists.

Spotify has an AI slop problem. The company has been outspoken recently in its efforts to address the deluge of AI impersonators and content farms pushing out “slop” onto the platform and “[interfering] with authentic artists working to build their careers.” But despite the promises, the streamer’s paying subscribers are fed up.

“Discover Weekly is unusable now ‘cause it is just full of AI slop,” wrote one user on the former Twitter. “Dear Spotify, please stop putting AI music in my Discover Weekly. Sincerely, everyone,” wrote another.

“I had no idea how bad it had gotten, since none of it was being shown to me,” another user reported. “Then a friend sent me his AI music on Spotify, I listened, and my recommendations were all AI for my usual genres suddenly.”

A forum post on Spotify’s Community page from August last year indicates the issue has been around for over a year now. Many users have threatened to leave Spotify altogether as a result.

“Six songs out of 30 on my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify were AI this week,” said a user on Bluesky. “Ridiculous that Spotify is pushing this crap on us. Looks like that’s it for Spotify.”

The overarching issue stems from Spotify’s unwillingness to implement a “blanket ban” on AI content. In September, the company announced a host of new policies to protect artists from “spam, impersonation, and deception.” That included a new “filter” that Spotify claims can detect common tactics used by spammers to manipulate the platform’s royalties system. Further, Spotify promised to establish “AI disclosures for music with industry-standard credits.”

But the company stopped short of forbidding AI content altogether. Spotify has argued that “music has always been shaped by technology,” and that “at its best, AI is unlocking incredible new ways for artists to create music and for listeners to discover it.”

“We’ve invested massively in fighting spam over the past decade,” Spotify wrote in a prior announcement. “In fact, in the past 12 months alone, a period marked by the explosion of generative AI tools, we’ve removed over 75 million spammy tracks from Spotify.”

Earlier this year, AI band The Velvet Sundown made headlines after accumulating millions of streams and being “outed” as an AI project. Even more damning, Spotify has been caught populating the profiles of “long-dead” artists with AI-generated songs that imitate their style.

Unfortunately, Spotify probably isn’t very incentivized to remove AI tracks from its ecosystem. According to Pitchfork, that’s not because the company thinks it’s “ushering in a new era,” but because “it’s generating streams.”

“If the company actually wants to be transparent and control spam, they need to go way harder,” wrote Pitchfork’s Kieran Press-Reynolds. “It’s a half-baked half-measure. Similar to YouTube’s self-disclosure system, […] Spotify doesn’t seem to be making this a mandatory admission.”

Indeed, Spotify is instead trying to empower AI merchants and musicians using AI “responsibly” to showcase how they’re using it—as if it’s a point of pride. Perhaps at the end of the day, the only thing that will make Spotify take action is a more expansive exodus of users from the platform.