Spotify Yanks More Than 50M AI “Slop and Spam” Tracks a Year Into Crackdown

People listen to Spotify and apparently Spotify listens to people as evidenced by the fact that the streaming platform cut more than 50 million “AI-generated slop and spam” tracks from recommendations this year after listeners expressed their distaste for the junk songs, according to reports. Music Business Worldwide reported Tuesday on disclosures by Spotify in which the music service revealed that since it announced AI protections a year ago it had removed the millions of slop and spam tracks from recommendations. Those 50 million removed tracks were in addition to 75 million “spammy tracks” Spotify said it had removed in recent years. “Earlier this year, we looked closely at the tracks listeners were skipping, ignoring, or telling us they didn’t want to hear,” Spotify said in a post on its site. “A clear pattern emerged: these tracks were consistently ones identified as slop or spam. Over the past six months, we’ve made numerous updates to our recommendation system to remove slop and spam, and surface more music made by authentic, human artists.” Trashing spam and slop has worked, according to Spotify, which added, “Since we made these changes, we’ve seen a marked decrease in li...