Comment by reconnecting
5 hours ago
The more appropriate question is why they published a AI artist at all. I think Spotify (or its owners/investors) might actually benefit from recommending AI-generated music by not having to pay real artists.
Like Spotify owns distribution, their largest investor Tencent Music Entertainment Group publishes AI-generated music = almost infinite profit.
From news: Tencent Music demonstrated strong revenue (1) growth in Q4 2025, with total revenues increasing by 16% year-over-year.
CEO of Tencent Music stated, "Our robust revenue growth and expansion in non-subscription services highlight our strategic focus on diversifying revenue streams. However, we acknowledge the need to address earnings challenges to meet investor expectations."
1. https://www.investing.com/news/transcripts/earnings-call-tra...
> The more appropriate question is why they published a AI artist at all.
Because they allow anyone to upload to Spotify. There's nothing stopping me, you, or anyone from generating AI tracks with Suno & friends, downloading them, and using a service like LANDR or Amuse to distribute them to Spotify, all for free.
> Like Spotify owns distribution, their largest investor Tencent Music Entertainment Group publishes AI-generated music = almost infinite profit.
This assumes that real people are listening to AI-generated music which does not seem to be the case. According to Deezer, 85% of streams on AI-generated music are fraudulent.[0] It's largely a vanity ouroboros where someone with more money than sense generates a song, pays bots to get fraudulent streams, and uses those streams to generate vanity metrics. Consumers are by and large not listening to AI generated music.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/deezer-says-44-of-songs-up...
hn consumers by and large weren’t upvoting AI-written technology articles 12 months ago. The models got better, and now multiple such articles appear on the front page daily—with glowing comments.
Humanity’s aesthetics are not (apparently) all that sophisticated on average.
nah, you just have some anthropocentric arrogance that only humans can write well. It is nothing to do with sophistication.
Same thing with music - I honestly prefer the clanker groups, largely because some of the genres I like were clearly not explored well by actual humans. The AI songs are just better for that reason. Reddit is full of people sad/mad when they find out the groups are AIs and not humans. I went through it too but now I just enjoy the music.
I think there's probably some type of value in the preservation of human art, but to say that it's better in a vacuum is just ignoring reality.
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Could you give some examples of such articles?
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HN is the most concentrated accelerationist audience in the whole world and its very particular type of crowd. I don't think this translates at all to general public (well, maybe I would agree with you that the aesthetic sense of people on here is really less sophisticated than average).
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6 tracks have made the Billboard charts. That's a pretty definitive signal that people are listening to AI music.
Where to draw the line on what is/isn't AI is a rabbit hole in and of itself. You'd have a hard time convincing me that people aren't using AI to build the most powerful DSP plugins. I've been very pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to make very music-useful tools with Faust and Codex.
https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-char...
One of the problems is that it's hard to tell at first that it's AI music. Probably still hard to figure it out by ear after you've been told. But I think not nearly as many people would choose to listen to AI songs if they knew they were AI.
There's a reason it can succeed as it is now. Making music that is catchy to our ears is fairly formulaic. It's easy fot AI to do the same. But if they start labeling which music is AI and which isn't, it probably won't succeed as well.
I was pretty pissed and considered canceling my Spotify Premium after the first time I'd realized I'd been duped by AI songs. I just report them any time I see them now. If they gave me a settings option to block all AI music I'd be fine.
How many tracks didn't make it to the Billboard charts?
> This assumes that real people are listening to AI-generated music which does not seem to be the case.
Spotify will still profit from fraudulent streams at the expense of advertisers.
Who will then stop advertising on there real quickly once they find out what's going on
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> Consumers are by and large not listening to AI generated music
Consumers are sadly too ignorant to tell. YouTube is brimming with AI music slop and people praising it in the comments because they are unable to tell the difference (and it is actually pretty easy once you know what to look out for)
How can you trust that the commenters aren't AI too?
Realistically speaking, why is that a problem? What is the point of music if not enjoyment? If these people enjoy it, what's wrong with it?
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Could you elaborate? I can't tell with music and voice
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If AI music sells like you proclaim, it would be bad for spotify to NOT ban it, since it is printing money.
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> Lie. You will not. You need to go through the distributor (1), and it has always been this way.
Er yes, which is why I mentioned LANDR and Amuse, both of which are on the page you linked. I mentioned those two specifically because I know they don't charge up-front and instead take a % of royalties, so they're ideal for flooding Spotify with AI slop. I'm not sure which part you think is a lie.
> You need to go through a distributor (1) that does due diligence first, and it has always been this way.
I see you edited your comment. Distributors do not do any sort of "due diligence". For the free distributors, you don't even need to give them personal information until you try to actually cash out your earnings. For DistroKid, when I first signed up I put in my credit card info, submitted my first song and it was up on Spotify 3 days later.
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I would argue AI artists are antithetical to their business model, when people can generate their own versions of popular IP, they'll just use that.
People are not seeking out the AI music, it’s coming up in algorithmic playlists and hoping people don’t notice. If you search for any popular artist you’ll find covers that are almost all ai. There’s also generic playlists especially hoping someone asks Siri to play xyz.
i agree they want to make more money but come on calling them "AI artist" ?
That is definitely the case, they cover this and many other interesting things about Spotify in the book Mood Machine
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214151728-mood-machine
i recall reading an article in the guardian or some other newspaper about some basically unknown companies that contract musicians to create stock background music for television. what was interesting is that they now create hyper-specialized music and ambience, which is then picked up by spotify for curated playlists. they create basically filler content, and for some reason these genre/mood playlists generate enough revenue from casual listeners so it is a worthwhile niche, and i guess that ai-generated music is the natural progression from that.
edit: it might've been this wikipedia page and some swedish newspaper i had read. i specifically remember Epidemic Sound, as the swedish state television sometimes uses them for stock sound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_...
They are paying the people uploading the AI music. They don’t care if they pay a real singer or someone that created a song with AI.
> I think Spotify (or its owners/investors) might actually benefit from recommending AI-generated music by not having to pay real artists.
You can remove the think and might; there were articles years ago saying Spotify actually commissioned artists to produce fairly generic songs for the highly played but passively listened to "background noise" playlists, so that Spotify would get the revenue / not pay real artists. I wouldn't be surprised if they replaced those commissioned productions with AI generated stuff to try and cut costs.
I would love to be able to filter out AI-generated music entirely. I stopped using Spotify's Discovery function as I can't bear this glitchy, really bad slop. It's like those "bad kitty" animations, but in music form. It's really insulting, both for the audience and artists, that they are promoting such lousy content. I hope that Spotify won't take the route of enshittification, quite literally.
The thing about Spotify is that is NOT driven by record labels, it is an platform for the individual meaning an individual can upload their music in an laissez-faire situation.
If they disallow AI artists tomorrow, they are going against what they created the company for.
That's every move Spotify has done recently.
Podcasts, audiobooks, AI music, and now an entire fitness hub - they really don't want to pay actual artists anything for their music while jacking up prices for everyone else.
(Oh, and sitting back and crying "app fairness" for quite some time, but it's odd that they haven't been complaining about Apple in a hot minute in the DSA fight yet still won't ship long overdue support like AirPlay 2...)
You're right on what they're doing, but not the why:
1. They're getting the short end of the deal with music licensing (as are artists, btw)
2. They can't pay the artists more: the vast majority of the money goes to labels
3. The only way Spotify can grow profits if it moves to content that's not under the iron grip of the labels: podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783435
You're forgetting:
4. Once Spotify wrests power from the labels, they start the enshitification process themselves.
I gave up on Spotify when they did their push into podcasts and audiobooks. It became clear that they weren't really interested in serving their core customer base of people who just want to listen to music.
There are some decent AI songs out there, I’ve met a few people who can’t tell and don’t care that they are listening to AI music.
If it sounds good, why not allow it?
Purists have some agenda against AI that it's "soulless" and people shouldn't be allowed to enjoy that sort of music.
Remember when Radiohead launched in rainbows all digital and a LOT of people protested?
wanting to support actual artists is being a "purist", why can't we just have opt in toggle to allow AI slop?
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