Spotify Announces Badge For “AI Personas,” Will Exclude Their Music From Recommendations

Spotify announced today that profiles for fully AI-generated artists will now be labeled as "AI Personas," and the streamer will exclude music from these profiles from their editorial and algorithmic recommendations. It's an intriguing step in a saga that is becoming central to the health of the music industry.AI-generated music has been flooding onto DSPs at a massive scale. Back in April, the French streaming service Deezer estimated that 44% of all new songs uploaded to their database were created by AI, a harvest of about 75,000 AI-gen tracks per day. This phenomenon has raised concerns among musical artists, whose work was already at risk of getting lost in the seemingly infinite glut of music available online, and the alarms seem to ring louder every time a fully AI-created act like the Velvet Sundown goes viral.Journalists like Liz Pelly have chronicled Spotify's practice of lining their playlists with "ghost artists," essentially muzak commissioned by the company and licensed at a lower royalty rate. Her fellow Spotify skeptic Damon Krukowski points out that some of this muzak is owned by Spotify-connected companies, such as the catalog of Johan Röhr, a fixture of Spotify's...