Comment by mjr00
5 hours ago
> 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.
Exactly backwards: These articles suck because the writing sucks. There was this morning a well-written, engaging article about building a Gameboy emulator in F# that the author admitted using some LLM help to compose. Easy upvote.
It’s not impossible to get these tools to make your writing better, and presumably that will become easier over time. But if you don’t put in the effort & your own clear ideas, the result today is garbage. But pleasing garbage to a wide swath of the hn audience. Pop tech writing!
Could you give some examples of such articles?
Here’s a sample of my “flagged” list from just the past few days:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897140
Not the person you're replying to, but here's one that was at the top of the homepage this morning (and that I immediately clicked out of because it had that AI stink). I would bet my next paycheck that this was heavily edited by an LLM, if not outright written by one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973376
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).
My point is that most of these “vibe articles” are pretty bad. They’re muddled in their ideas and full of gaps in logic or fact.
But the aesthetics are tuned enough to get upvotes from this same audience that thinks AI music is going nowhere.
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
That's a long-term challenge for the next CEO to figure out.
Unlike CTC or CTC, radio and streaming ad campaigns are notoriously hard to track and attribute, and hence trend to brand-awareness. Advertisers won't see the effect of rising fraudulent streams immediately.
> 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?
It takes away from real human artists who do their part to slowly advance human culture. Music will not develop without human artists. Maybe for this moment in time AI can fulfill some people's musical desires, but it's not going to keep up with the times. The point of art, in a general sense, is humanity. Automating away your artistic needs is like automating away your social needs. It's a one way "relationship" that is superficial and self-indulgent. It's a step towards an empty world.
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You hear a song with vocals that strongly emotionally resonate with you, reminding you of your mother who passed away recently after a long terrible illness. You want to know more about the singer that almost brought you to tears, only to find there is none and that the song was AI generated.
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Could you elaborate? I can't tell with music and voice
You won't tell from the music. It's obviously an AI generated mix when:
- the channel posts multiple mixes per week
- the thumbnail is clearly AI generated
- most importantly, the tracklist never includes any author, because there are none
If you search for "<genre> mix" on YouTube right now, 9/10 results fail these criteria.
Lo-fi channels used to show the artist and song names. These newer ones don't bother with credits, or have made up song titles.
E.g. "funky chicken jam"
If AI music sells like you proclaim, it would be bad for spotify to NOT ban it, since it is printing money.
It's like the MBS during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Today it prints money, tomorrow it blows up in your face.
Yeah they put a blue check on it like Elon did. Until they get paid to put the check on slop. Rotten fish is still rotten even if you mix it with fresh fish and label it accordingly.
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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.
Apologies, I had correct my comment prior to your reply.
> Because they allow anyone to upload to Spotify.
No one is allowed to upload directly to Spotify. However, I wasn't aware that distributors might not vet content prior to publishing.
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